U-KISS's Eli Says He Sent $33K Before the Child Support Drama Started

Former U-KISS member Eli went public on the 5th with a detailed rebuttal to accusations that he underpays child support for his son, claiming the widely circulated 850,000 KRW figure tells only part of the story.

"I've seen a lot of comments calling me a terrible person or saying I'm stingy with child support," he wrote in a lengthy post on his SNS account. "I didn't want to address this publicly, but I do want to explain how 850,000 KRW became the number."

What he says actually happened

According to Eli, the monthly fixed figure came after a longer, messier arrangement. During his divorce from model and broadcaster Ji Yeonsu, he says he resisted setting a formal amount at all. His preference was to send money whenever specific needs came up: school supplies, meals out, anything his son required. "I didn't want to put a price tag on my son's welfare," he wrote.

He claims that between November 2020 and May 2022, he sent a total of 44,378,175 KRW, roughly $33,000, through that informal arrangement, sometimes 6,000 to 8,000 dollars in a single month. The problem, he acknowledges, is that none of it was formally designated as child support.

That distinction came back to hurt him. He says he saw Ji Yeonsu appear on the 2021 SBS Plus variety show Kang Ho-dong's Bapsim and say publicly that he wasn't paying child support. Technically, she wasn't wrong; the payments had no legal label. But from his perspective, he had been covering his son's living costs out of his own pocket for over a year.

The pandemic math

Eli was direct about where the money came from. He was earning minimum wage during the pandemic, and a significant portion of what he sent came from savings he'd spent years building. He says he reached a point where he was genuinely worried about going into debt.

"That experience was one of the reasons 850,000 KRW became the set amount," he wrote. He stopped short of calling it adequate; he framed it as the number he could commit to without going under.

What seemed to sting him separately was not the public criticism itself but the fact that someone he'd previously worked with appeared to agree with the narrative that he was a bad person. He didn't name anyone. "Hearing someone I once worked with side with the idea that I'm a monster, that hurt more than anything else," he wrote.

The apology he won't give

Eli offered partial acknowledgment of public frustration. "I understand that hearing only the number, without context, would lead people to form a negative impression," he wrote. "If the figure upset anyone, I'm sorry for that. But I'm not going to apologize for the circumstances that led me to that decision."

He added that he still gives his son money when they meet and during Korean holidays, and that he hopes to never have to explain himself publicly again. "Winning an argument on the internet matters a lot less to me than my son does," he wrote. "There are two sides to every story."

For background: Eli and Ji Yeonsu registered their marriage in 2014, had their son Minsu in 2016, held a formal wedding ceremony in 2017, and divorced in 2020. Ji Yeonsu has been raising Minsu alone since then. Eli remarried in June. The child support figure of 850,000 KRW came to public attention when Ji Yeonsu mentioned it earlier this year, prompting criticism online that the amount was too low. Eli's post on the 5th was his first direct response.