SM Called It Minor, but Yeri Says the 2016 Accident Hurt Her for 10 Years

Red Velvet's Yeri is still living with the consequences of a taxi accident that happened in October 2016, and in a YouTube video posted on the 16th, she made clear that what SM Entertainment called a "minor injury" at the time was anything but.

The video, titled 으른여자 and shared on Yeri's personal YouTube channel, shows her doing a pottery-making session with fellow Red Velvet member Seulgi. Somewhere between shaping clay and catching up, the conversation drifted to the accident they'd both been in nearly ten years ago, and what followed was the most candid account either member has given of what actually happened that night.

What Yeri remembers

According to Yeri, the two were in a taxi heading back to their dorm after a trip to Lotte World when the crash occurred near Seongsu-dong. The cab collided with a garbage truck due to the driver's carelessness. Because the car curved toward her side on impact, Yeri took the full force of the collision: she was thrown forward and hit hard, while Seulgi and the driver came away relatively unscathed.

"I opened my eyes and thought, 'What is this? It hurts so much,'" Yeri recalled. The whites of her eyes turned completely red from burst blood vessels, and the impact caused a visible shift in the position of one eye. She spent significant time hospitalized and recovering, and says she took several months away from activities during that period. "When I was actually hospitalized, I was so depressed," she said. "It took a really long time to recover."

Seulgi, sitting beside her, added her own memory of that moment: turning to look at Yeri right after the crash and seeing blood coming from her mouth. "I was so shocked," she said.

The gap between the statement and the reality

At the time of the accident, SM Entertainment told media that both Seulgi and Yeri had sustained "minor injuries such as bruises" while returning by taxi from their break. The word "minor" is the part Yeri pushed back on directly. "The news reports called it a minor accident, but for me it was not minor at all. I was seriously hurt."

She also considered surgery on the affected eye. "My eye actually sits a little deeper on this side," she explained, noting that she deliberated for a long time over whether to have a procedure done before deciding against it.

Still there, a decade later

The most striking detail in the conversation was what has stayed with her. Yeri said she now has floaters, the medical term for the condition she described as seeing small floating shapes, like tiny dark specks drifting across her field of vision. "They told me it developed because of the accident," she said. "Even now, when I open my eyes, there are these small round things. They said there's nothing you can do about it. I'm just living with it."

Floaters are caused by changes to the vitreous, the gel-like fluid inside the eye, and can become permanent after trauma. The casual, matter-of-fact way Yeri described her current reality, I'm just living with it, made the weight of it land harder than any dramatic retelling would have. Ten years is a long time to carry something that started with a night out at an amusement park.