Netflix virtually had the very best present of the 12 months on its palms. Beef, a hypnotic portrait of strangers who take their self-hatred out on one another after a car parking zone spat, has racked up the admiration of audiences and critics — together with myself — because it got here out on April 6. However lower than two weeks after its launch, the present’s legacy has already been tainted by an issue surrounding one among its fundamental forged members: David Choe, a star artist who performs Isaac, a temperamental grifter on parole. He’s come underneath fireplace for his historical past of graphically bragging and joking about rape.
In 2014, on his podcast DVDASA, which stands for “Double Vag, Double Anal, Delicate Artist,” Choe recounted a narrative about forcing his therapeutic massage therapist to look at him masturbate, then maintain his penis, then carry out oral intercourse on him. His pal and cohost, the porn actor Asa Akira, interjected to say that he was “principally” admitting to rape, however he shrugged it off.
A month later, after journalist Melissa Stetten introduced public consideration to the incident in a put up on xoJane, Choe issued a proper apology wherein he claimed that he made the story up, calling it his mission as “an artist and a storyteller” to problem his buddies and listeners with “darkish, tasteless” concepts. However his profession continued apace. Though one among his murals was vandalized in 2017, presumably in protest of the identical controversy, which prompted one other public apology, Choe didn’t appear to undergo any main skilled penalties. Being provocative merely turned a part of his model. In a 2021 profile within the New York Occasions, Choe mentioned “it was unusually comforting to be so despised” in 2014 as a result of the exterior hate lastly matched his personal self-loathing. It didn’t appear to trouble him that Disney warned its subsidiary firm FX towards buying his TV sequence, The Choe Present, on account of his controversial historical past. He funded the present himself, and in any case, the corporate purchased it anyway. In a smug however prescient quote, he declared, “If you wish to come and attempt to cancel me, that’s OK.”
Now that he’s connected to a undertaking as excessive profile as Beef, this 9-year-old controversy has change into inescapable. Writers Aura Bogado and Meecham Meriweather recirculated clips of the unique podcast episode on Twitter final week, inflicting followers to marvel why Choe had been forged and what steps Beef’s manufacturing group would take to sentence his conduct. (Twitter deleted the tweets after Choe’s basis requested that Bogado’s and Meriweather’s tweets be removed on copyright grounds). This time, folks have drawn consideration to Choe’s description of his therapeutic massage therapist as “half Black, half white,” arguing that his story not solely normalizes rape however contributes to a protracted historical past of objectifying Black girls, who expertise sexual violence at disproportionately excessive charges.
So far, no person from Beef has made any public feedback. Present creator Lee Sung Jin, in addition to costars and government producers Ali Wong and Steven Yeun, have remained silent. (Wong set her Twitter account to personal seemingly in gentle of the controversy). So far as harm management goes, it’s disappointingly evasive.
