Netflix’s new miniseries Beef proved to be a major hit when it premiered on Netflix earlier this month. But since then, the show’s success has been clouded by a controversy involving one of its cast, David Choe, who is also an artist and has twice painted murals at Facebook headquarters.
In a 2014 recording for Choe’s now-defunct podcast DVDASAhe described forcing a masseuse to perform non-consensual sex acts on him.
“I’m just starting to jerk off,” he recalled of the incident on the massage table. “Then her hand leaves my leg and she stops. I say, ‘Look, I’m sorry, I can’t help it. Can you just pretend I’m not doing this and you carry on with the massage?'”
According to Choe’s story, the woman continued the massage before he attempted to grab her buttocks. She walked away. “She’s definitely not into it, but she’s not stopping it either,” he continued.
“I say, ‘Kiss him a little’ and she says, ‘No, all the massage oil is on it. And I take the back of her head and push it onto my cock and she doesn’t. And I say, “Open your mouth, open your mouth,” and she does, and I start kissing her face.
Choe concluded that “the thrill of eventually going to jail” is “what made the quest for the erection possible”.
“Are you telling us you’re a rapist right now?” the podcast’s co-host, actress and adult film director Asa Akira, asked Choe. He replied, “Yes.”
The clip was widely shared on social media last week, amid the attention to Beef. Now, however, the DVDASA The clip is much harder to find online: Twitter removed the videos from its site after Choe allegedly claimed they violated its copyright.
In a message to Twitter, which was shared online by journalists who originally posted the clip, Choe wrote, “Several Twitter users…re-uploaded a clip from Episode 106 “Erection Quest” of our DVDASA live podcast and video series which was originally published on March 10, 2014 without our consent.
Social media users were quick to denounce Choe’s hypocrisy invoking consent. Others openly blasted Netflix and the stars of Beef for giving a platform to an alleged rapist. The nonprofit Freedom of the Press Association accused Choe of silencing journalists to protect his own reputation. “The abuse of copyright takedown procedures to censor journalists is a serious and growing problem,” said the group wrote on Twitter.
Representatives for Netflix did not respond to a request for comment.
Choe was born and raised in Los Angeles to Korean immigrant parents. His early self-published graphic novels earned him a cult following, as did his “dirty” and often hypersexualized style of painting. In 2005, Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker, asked him to paint several murals in Facebook former Silicon Valley office. Mark Zuckerberg asked the artist to redo it in 2007 for the company’s new headquarters.
For his work, Choe chose to be paid in company stock rather than cash, and at the time of Facebook’s 2012 IPO, those shares were reportedly worth as much as $200 million.
Since then, Choe’s illustrations and writings have appeared in scammer And Vice magazines, and he has had exhibitions in galleries in Los Angeles, London and New York.
Choe publicly addressed the DVDASA clip after it aired in 2014, saying in a statement that it detailed an imaginary rape rather than a real one. “I never thought I would wake up late in the afternoon and hear myself called a rapist,” he said. written at the time. “It sucks. Especially because I’m not one. I’m not a rapist. I hate rapists, I think rapists should be raped and murdered.
In 2017, protesters gathered in front of a mural Choe painted on the Bowery in New York to speak against the artist and the “normalization of rape culture”.
The artist was the star of the 2021s The Choe Show, in which he interviewed famous guests and painted their portraits. In BeefChoe plays a petty criminal and the cousin of one of the series’ protagonists, Steven Yuen.
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