Kim Sae-ron's death adds to a growing list of high-profile celebrity deaths in South Korea, which some experts attribute to the enormous pressure celebrities face under the gaze of a relentlessly unforgiving media that seizes on every misstep.
The Associated PressA TV screen shows a file image of late South Korean actor Kim Sae-ron during a news program at Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025. In the about 1,000 days between her drunken-driving crash in May 2022 and her death, South Korean mainstream news organizations published at least around 2,000 stories on film actor Kim Sae-ron.
Kim’s death, which police consider a suicide, adds to a growing list of high-profile celebrity deaths in the country, which some experts attribute to the enormous pressure celebrities face under the gaze of a relentlessly unforgiving media that seizes on every misstep.A sudden fall from graceKim rose to stardom as a child actor with the 2010 hit crime thriller “The Man from Nowhere” and garnered acclaim and popularity for her acting in movies and TV dramas for years.
Other entertainers, especially female, have struggled to find work after run-ins with the law, including drunken driving or substance abuse, and experts say many of them are reluctant to seek treatment for mental health problems like depression, fearing further negative coverage. But a spate of high-profile deaths has sparked discussions about how news organizations cover the private lives of celebrities and whether floods of critical online comments are harming their mental health. Similar conversations happened after the 2008 death of mega movie star Choi Jin-sil; the death of her former baseball star husband, Cho Sung-min, in 2013; the deaths of K-Pop singers Sulli and Goo Hara in 2019; and the death of “Parasite” actor Lee Sun-kyun in 2023.
Following the 2019 deaths of Sulli and Goo Hara, which were widely attributed to cyberbullying and sexual harassment both in the public and media, lawmakers proposed various measures to discourage harsh online comments. These included expanding real-name requirements and strengthening websites’ requirements to weed out hate speech and false information, but none of these proposed laws passed.
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