Court Throws Out 100M Won Suit Against Min Hee-jin Over ILLIT-NewJeans Copy Claims

A Seoul court handed former ADOR CEO Min Hee-jin a clean win on September 18, dismissing a 100 million won defamation claim against her after ruling that the plaintiff was never actually identifiable as someone she targeted.

The case was filed by a creative director at Belift Lab, the HYBE subsidiary behind ILLIT, who argued that Min's public statements accusing ILLIT of copying NewJeans damaged her reputation. The Seoul Western District Court's Civil Division 22, presided over by Judge Park Geun-gyu, rejected every claim on August 21. The plaintiff has since waived her right to appeal, making the dismissal final. Court costs were also assigned to the plaintiff.

Why the court said no

The ruling turned on a single legal question: was the plaintiff ever identifiable as the person Min was attacking? The court said no.

Min's statements, which spanned an official position paper, a press conference, oral arguments in a separate courtroom proceeding in October 2024, and materials distributed to media, never mentioned the Belift Lab director by name or job title. The copying allegations were directed at HYBE and Belift Lab as organizations, and covered ILLIT's broader creative output across hair, makeup, styling, choreography, photography, and video. Nothing in those statements singled out the visual direction work this particular director handled.

The court also noted that the director was not a public-facing figure. She had not appeared prominently during ILLIT's debut process, and the general public would have had no reason to connect her to the group's creation. Without that public profile, the court found it implausible that Min's statements would have led anyone to identify her as a target.

On the harassment the director claims she suffered after Min's statements, including malicious comments and defamatory videos, the court found no direct causal link to Min's conduct. There was also no evidence, the ruling stated, that Min intended to target the director as an individual.

Because the basic premise of the claim failed, the court declined to rule on the remaining legal questions: whether Min's statements constituted a statement of fact, whether that content was false, and whether public interest could have justified them regardless.

The bigger picture

The backstory here is the 2024 rupture between Min Hee-jin and HYBE. In April of that year, Min released a position statement and held a press conference alleging that ILLIT had copied NewJeans across multiple creative domains. The claims were explosive and the fallout was prolonged, spawning a tangle of legal disputes that are still working through the courts.

This ruling resolves one thread, but not the whole knot. Belift Lab has a separate 2 billion won-plus damages suit against Min Hee-jin still pending, with a verdict scheduled for November 13.