Beef‘s creator and stars finally speak on David Choe’s rape story
Lee Sung Jin, Ali Wong and Steven Yeun called the Beef actor's 2014 comments "undeniably hurtful and extremely disturbing" in a joint statement
Aux News David Choe
Today, Beef creator Lee Sung Jin and stars Ali Wong and Steven Yeun have finally addressed the resurfaced podcast episode wherein David Choe—who plays Isaac in the Netflix series—jokes that he is a “successful rapist” in a bizarre, troubling story he’s insisted over the years was a bad joke.
“The story David Choe fabricated nine years ago is undeniably hurtful and extremely disturbing. We do not condone this story in any way, and we understand why this has been so upsetting and triggering,” Lee, Wong, and Yeun shared in a joint statement made to Vanity Fair on Friday. “We’re aware David has apologized in the past for making up this horrific story, and we’ve seen him put in the work to get the mental health support he needed over the last decade to better himself and learn from his mistakes.”
The clip that initially found Choe under scrutiny came from a 2014 episode of Choe’s since-discontinued podcast DVDASA (Double Vag, Double Anal, Sensitive Artist). Titled “Erection Quest,” the episode features Choe telling co-host and adult film actor Asa Akira a story about forcing a massage parlor employee to perform oral sex on him despite repeated protestation, becoming aroused in the process of recalling it.
As Lee, Wong, and Yeun state, Choe has previously apologized for the comments, most recently in a 2017 Instagram post. Choe has maintained that the comments were “bad storytelling in the style of douche” and not actual admissions of violence.
Although Choe has behaved apologetically in the past, an initial response to the most recent resurfacing of the story didn’t exactly ring remorseful. Since the clip first gained traction on Twitter last week, Choe has yet to respond directly to the renewed criticism or issue another apology for his actions. But Choe did appear to issue copyright strikes against two writers, Aura Bogado and Meecham Whitson Meriweather, who shared the clip on Twitter, on the grounds that his nonprofit owns the footage.
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Choe has yet to respond directly to the renewed criticism or issue another apology for his actionsHe should probably read something that his publicist writes for him, but this sounds like the same manufactured angst as when Ellie Kemper didn’t immediately respond to something that it took the internet decades to rediscover and that she had already apologized for previously.
Weird take bro
Please don’t compare Ellie unknowingly participating racist activity as a teenager (which isn’t great!) to a grown ass man bragging about raping a woman and getting sexually aroused by it (which is heinous).
A lil interracial rape fantasy starring an Asian guy facefucking a Black chick. No need to blow your load over it
I’d like to know how they’re so sure it was fabricated
Yes, it’s really stupid edgelord humor in the worst possible taste, which is disappointingly common on the internet. And he has apologized for it in the past. And his coworkers vouch for him trying to improve himself in the intervening years. But I suppose I can see how that’s not enough, and instead he ought to be shunned by the industry and forced to make a living some other way.
Personally I expected better from the Double Vag, Double Anal, Sensitive Artist podcast.
I was just relieved that the ‘SA’ portion of ‘DVDASA’ didn’t stand for something more…thematically appropriate to the story.
Apologies are never enough. He made some masseuse Choe Down his load and he must be cancelled! Stay woke.
Poor guy, hes only worth 100 Million dollars how will he make a living if he gets canceled!
He made millions off of making art for Zuckerberg before FB went public (he was paid in stock). Trust me, he doesn’t need the money. And the fact that he didn’t issue a new apology right now or express remorse for minimizing rape the way he did is extremely telling.
…why would he need to issue a new apology? He had already apologized more than once for a FABRICATED story told years ago. It’s telling that this isn’t enough for you.
Sydney Sage is a fuckin porn star name
Thank Christ they finally responded to something you guys first reported on (1 … 2 … 3) 3 days ago.
It’s a three-day rule of internet outrage: If you don’t show appropriate levels of condemnation and horror within three days, you’re worse than Hitler.
Oh come on, why is it always worse than Hitler? Why can’t someone just be exactly as bad as Hitler? This Hitlerflation is going to run the modern discourse.
You misspelled “ruin” — you are exactly as bad as Pol Pot.
*checks item off bucket list*
At this point, the thing that really pisses me off is when these guys say something like this, and then have the nerve to act surprised when people get upset about it. We’re long past the point where anyone believes you don’t know that will happen.
Haha I think it’s perfectly expected for someone to be surprised that people are still getting upset over a fabricated story from years ago that has been addressed in multiple occasions. It’s overkill.
He clearly said that the masseuse was black, so he’s definitely not a
racist just a rapist. A lil interracial rape fantasy starring an Asian
guy facefucking a Black chick. No need to blow your load over it
I work on the assumption that people who joke about rape aren’t really joking. They’re usually grooming their friends to not react when they do something more overtly rapey than just joking about it. It’s de-sensitization and normalization.
Right
…so you’re psychotic?
Yeah, like Roiland ranting on his podcast about how historically girls got married at a young age.
Depends on how they’re joking about it, and how much. I’m pretty sure we’ve all known people who made a lot of jokes about certain things, and then have found out that no, they’re genuinely into those things.But a lot of people enjoy dark humor and will joke about anything (especially if, like myself, they never left ‘People find this offensive therefore I find this funny’ in the past). And an attempt at dark humor, when poorly executed, can just come across as dark. As it did in this case. At least I’m hoping it was someone trying for edgy-funny and failing, not someone actually telling a ‘funny’ story about committing sexual assault.
That’s a bad assumption, though.
…and that should be the end of it. He apologized multiple times for a fabricated story. Yet we have folks, who are seemingly addicted to outrage, continually calling for him to be raked over the coals and be denied career opportunities. It was a fabricated story…not an actual act of sexual assault. That matters.
Some people are never satisfied. He clearly said that the masseuse was black, so he’s definitely not a racist just a rapist. A lil interracial rape fantasy starring an Asian guy facefucking a Black chick. No need to blow your load over it
I guess no one watches netflix cooking shows, or was there outrage when he appeared on ugly delicious?It seens that by being a stupid-rich artist, he made friends with all the other famous asian people and now they want him on all their shows.Or maybe he is an investor in Netflix…
I’m kind of reminded of a thing a few years ago when an Asian comedian said that David Cross came up to her backstage and said a bunch of ‘ching chong ching chong’ stuff to her. Cross’s defense was that he was playing a character that was intended to make fun of the sort of person who would go up to someone and say racist stuff. But of course, it just came across as someone walking up to a person and saying racist stuff. I’m not generally a David Cross fan, but I do trust that he’s smart enough to know that it’s not acceptable to genuinely say racist shit like that even if he actually has some degree of antipathy toward Asian people. (Maybe he does hate Asians, and wanted to say some racist shit and figured he’d be able to get away with it if he couched it in enough layers of irony, I don’t know.)
So I can see how Choe could have been doing a bit, playing a reprehensible character who would tell a story about sexually assaulting someone. Maybe he thought that ‘Haha, it’s funny because it’s something I would never do, people know I’m a wholesome guy and being a rapist is so far outside of my persona that it becomes humorous to pretend to be one.’ And he wildly miscalculated, and the story that he came up with was really grounded and very much the sort of thing that you’d expect has actually happened to a non-trivial portion of masseuses.
In the same vein, Skids and Mudflap from the second Transformers film. Assuming you believe the writers, they were supposed to be mocking white people who act stereotypically black, but didn’t count on how an audience who had no idea of their thought process would only be seeing two neon-colored robots acting like offensive black caricatures, and the obvious takeaway would be that of itself was supposed to be the joke.
It seems like by now we should have come up with a solid bit of rhetoric for elucidating the difference between something that actually makes fun of racists, and something that merely thinks it’s making fun of racists. I don’t doubt that in a lot of cases, artists behind such things actually do think they’re making fun of racists, but somehow don’t understand that there needs to be something more to it than just doing it.A great example is the episode of Mad Men where Roger Sterling does a blackface performance at a garden party. Several of the other characters respond in a range of ways, from thinking it’s just tacky to being outright offended. If he’d just done blackface and the other characters hadn’t had any problem with it, you have to wonder if the creators just wanted to shock the audience by having blackface. But the showrunners deliberately made choices that made it clear that they do not actually condone blackface and are using it (as an era-appropriate mechanism) to show what an asshole Roger is.
I’m under the impression that this disgusting and almost certainly true story is just the tip of the iceberg as far as Choe is concerned. Seems like everyone he interacted with in the field of comic books has a horror story about this creep.
Shame, because Beef is stellar. And for other reasons.