Netflix virtually had one of the best present of the yr on its arms. Beef, a hypnotic portrait of strangers who take their self-hatred out on one another after a 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 certainly one of its predominant forged members: David Choe, a celeb artist who performs Isaac, a temperamental grifter on parole. He’s come below hearth 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 buddy and cohost, the porn actor Asa Akira, interjected to say that he was “mainly” admitting to rape, however he shrugged it off.
A month later, after journalist Melissa Stetten introduced public consideration to the incident in a submit on xoJane, Choe issued a proper apology through which he claimed that he made the story up, calling it his mission as “an artist and a storyteller” to problem his mates and listeners with “darkish, tasteless” concepts. However his profession continued apace. Though certainly one of his murals was vandalized in 2017, presumably in protest of the identical controversy, which prompted one other public apology, Choe didn’t appear to endure any main skilled penalties. Being provocative merely grew to become a part of his model. In a 2021 profile within the New York Instances, Choe stated “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 hassle him that Disney warned its subsidiary firm FX in opposition to buying his TV collection, The Choe Present, on account of his controversial historical past. He funded the present himself, and in spite of everything, 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 hooked up to a venture as excessive profile as Beef, this 9-year-old controversy has grow to be 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 habits. (Twitter deleted the tweets after Choe’s basis requested that Bogado’s and Meriweather’s tweets be eliminated on copyright grounds). This time, individuals 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 an extended historical past of objectifying Black ladies, who expertise sexual violence at disproportionately excessive charges.
To this point, 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 non-public seemingly in mild of the controversy). So far as injury management goes, it’s disappointingly evasive.
