One of the strangest aspects of the Burning Sun scandal is that the victims most frequently invoked in online discussions are not necessarily the victims whose perpetrators were actually convicted. In English-speaking spaces especially, discussion of Burning Sun frequently centers around a supposed human trafficking operation in which women were allegedly drugged, sold to VIPs, passed through secret rooms, and trafficked through a criminal enterprise supposedly connected to Seungri. Over time, these women have become the symbolic victims of Burning Sun, repeatedly invoked when discussing the severity of the scandal, condemning Seungri, or accusing anyone who questions the popular narrative of being insensitive toward victims.

The problem is that this trafficking operation was never established. Despite the extensive investigations surrounding Burning Sun, an organized human trafficking ring was not proven, and Seungri was never convicted of human trafficking. His prostitution mediation conviction involved arranging prostitution and is legally and factually distinct from trafficking. Conflating those charges may make the case sound more dramatic, but it also fundamentally changes what crime is being discussed and, by extension, who the supposed victims of that crime are.

This distinction matters because there were real victims throughout the broader collection of cases associated with Burning Sun. Women were raped, women were secretly filmed during sexual encounters, and intimate videos were shared in KakaoTalk group chats without the knowledge or consent of the women depicted. Some of those crimes resulted in investigations, prosecutions, convictions, and prison sentences. Yet the women whose victimization was actually established often receive less attention than the hypothetical victims of a trafficking operation that was never substantiated.

This does not mean that every allegation surrounding Burning Sun that failed to result in prosecution was necessarily false. Sexual violence is notoriously difficult to investigate and prosecute, and the absence of a conviction does not automatically mean that nothing occurred. The issue is much narrower than that. A specific narrative about an organized trafficking operation has been repeated so consistently that it is now treated as established fact, and an entire class of victims has effectively been constructed around it. Those hypothetical victims are then placed at the emotional center of the scandal while women whose assaults and violations were actually proven in court become secondary.

That creates a disturbing contradiction in the way Burning Sun is discussed. People who claim to be advocating for victims often spend significantly more time talking about Seungri, who was never charged with rape, than Jung Joonyoung, who was convicted of participating in sexual assault and was also prosecuted for secretly filming and distributing sexual videos. The same problem exists with Choi Jonghoon, who was convicted in connection with sexual assault. These are not speculative accusations, mistranslated rumors, or claims pulled from social media. They are crimes that resulted in convictions, yet both men are frequently treated as supporting characters in a story that has become overwhelmingly centered around Seungri.

This is what happens when victim advocacy becomes perpetrator-centered. Instead of beginning with the people who were harmed and asking what happened to them, who harmed them, and what accountability followed, the discussion begins with a chosen villain and works backward. The victims become evidence used to demonstrate how evil that person supposedly is rather than people whose experiences deserve attention in their own right. Within Burning Sun discourse, this problem is made worse by the fact that multiple separate investigations were gradually compressed into one simplified story.

Burning Sun became Seungri. The molka chats became Seungri. The sexual assaults became Seungri. The trafficking allegations became Seungri. The distinctions between the nightclub investigation, the prostitution mediation case, and the Jung Joonyoung group chat case became increasingly blurred until the entire scandal could be summarized through one recognizable celebrity. That may make the story easier to consume, but it also distorts who actually committed which crimes.

Jung Joonyoung is perhaps the clearest example of this distortion. His phone contained illegal sexual recordings and group chat material that became central to one of the most serious criminal cases associated with the broader scandal. He was convicted of sexual assault and crimes related to secretly filming and distributing sexual material. Choi Jonghoon was also convicted in connection with sexual assault. Both men ultimately served prison sentences, so it would be inaccurate to claim that they faced no consequences at all. The larger problem is that their names, their crimes, and the women they harmed have largely faded from public discussion while Seungri remains the permanent face of the entire scandal.

This imbalance becomes especially obvious years later. Seungri’s movements, business ventures, friendships, photographs, appearances, and rumors continue to generate outrage because every new development is filtered through the mythology that he was the mastermind of a massive trafficking operation. Meanwhile, Jung Joonyoung and Choi Jonghoon tend to reappear in international discussion only when Burning Sun itself becomes relevant again. Many people can confidently repeat that Seungri “trafficked women,” yet far fewer can explain what Jung Joonyoung was convicted of, what Choi Jonghoon was convicted of, or what happened to the women whose assaults resulted in criminal convictions.

For anyone claiming that their primary concern is the victims, that should be a serious problem. Somewhere along the way, the conversation stopped being primarily about what happened to women and became about what people believed a celebrity had done. The trafficking narrative does not simply spread inaccurate information about Seungri; more importantly, it distorts the identity of the victims themselves by replacing documented victims with a more sensational and emotionally useful set of hypothetical ones.

The actual victims complicate the popular version of the story because focusing on them requires focusing on their actual perpetrators. It requires talking about Jung Joonyoung, Choi Jonghoon, and the other men involved. It requires discussing molka, digital sex crimes, sexual violence, consent, misogyny, and the culture that allowed intimate videos of women to be treated as entertainment inside private group chats. Those issues are more complicated than a story about a celebrity running a trafficking empire, and they are considerably less convenient for a narrative built around one recognizable villain.

That is ultimately where the trafficking narrative becomes harmful to the very people it claims to defend. Advocacy is not supposed to prioritize whichever version of events produces the most shocking headline or the most satisfying villain. If concern for victims is genuine, then the women who were actually harmed should remain at the center of the discussion. Their experiences should matter more than the celebrity attached to the scandal, their perpetrators should matter more than whoever generates the most engagement online, and the crimes that actually happened to them should matter more than crimes that were added to the story because they made it easier to consume.

The women harmed throughout the Burning Sun scandal already had their privacy, consent, trust, and bodily autonomy violated. Their experiences should not also be pushed into the background in favor of a more marketable story about somebody else.