Singer Lee Seung-hwan.
Singer Lee Seung-hwan has filed a complaint against cartoonist Yoon Seo-in for a personal attack on him.
On the 8th, the law firm Haemaru representing Lee Seung-hwan officially announced that on June 8, 2026, Lee filed a lawsuit with the Seoul Central District Court seeking damages from cartoonist Yoon Seo-in over insulting expressions. The amount claimed as consolation money for the tort of insulting expression is 50 million won.
Haemaru stated that on May 29, while criticizing a post encouraging voting that Lee uploaded the same day, Yoon posted on his own social media account, and in the final part wrote the following: never having managed to form a family, having gotten divorced, an agitator lost in political delusions, at the age of sixty still saying strange things, how pitiful. The firm asserted that this clearly exceeds the scope of freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution and constitutes an insulting and contemptuous personal attack. In particular, it was a malicious disparagement and contemptuous expression about aspects of private life entirely unrelated to the overall context of the expression, and because it was posted in an open manner viewable by an unspecified large number of people, its unlawfulness is extremely grave.
They continued that, aside from this case, there are past instances in which expressions by Yoon became problematic and the judicial authorities directly judged their illegality. Moreover, immediately after Lee announced last Friday that he would take legal action against Yoon, in responding he committed the absurd act of reposting on his social media a mock apology letter masquerading as an apology instead of offering a sincere apology.
They also emphasized that while Lee deeply respects freedom of expression, he determined that the recent indiscriminate and boundless acts of insult occurring online are in fact shrinking the healthy public sphere of society. Therefore, to obtain an official legal confirmation that malicious acts with an obvious purpose of disparagement, such as the insult by Yoon in this case, constitute clear illegality, this suit was filed.
