Goo Hara Was a K-Pop Royal Who Deserved a Better World

KARA spent the late ‘00s and early ‘10s as a dominant act in K-pop, and was immensely popular thanks to hits like “Pretty Girl,” “Wanna,” “Mister,” “Lupin,” “Jet Coaster Love,” “Step,” and many others. The group helped pushed K-pop into Japan, the second-largest music market in the world, and became the first-ever female Korean act to perform at the Tokyo Dome in January 2013. She has had to testify in court on multiple occasions regarding the case, which is currently being appealed after the man, Choi Jong-bum, was given a prison sentence of a year and six months on a variety of charges related to the situation. During the ordeal, her contract with her former South Korean management company was reportedly terminated, though she was still under Japan’s Production Ogi at the time of her passing. In October, her close friend Sulli (Choi Jin-ri) died by suicide; she, too, had regularly been a victim of criticism through social media for living life her own way. Following Sulli’s death, Hara took to Instagram to say a sorrowful farewell to her friend, saying that the pair had been like true sisters and that she would try to live the other’s share of life in her stead, making her passing all that more more heartbreaking. Goo shared her final Instagram post in the early hours of Nov. 23 in South Korea; it featured a picture of the star in bed saying, “Sleep well.” “Korean women find it more and more difficult to report crimes as victims because they see female artists facing even greater backlashes & trauma because [of] how the public, police and the justice system respond to sexual assault, and that sends a clear message to all women in Korea,” Jihye Lee, a Bloomberg writer based in Korea, tweeted. A petition has also been uploaded to the website of the South Korean presidential Blue House demanding reform to laws related to sex crimes. She spent much of the decade as a woman empowered, dominating performances and sharing with the world an example of how a celebrity can be intimate and open with audiences in the age of social media curation -- and suffer because of it.