Claims have emerged that financial disputes were at the root of singer Jang Yun-jeong's estrangement from her mother.
YouTube channel Yeonye Dwittongyeong Yi Jin-ho, a celebrity insider show, released a video Thursday titled "The real reason Jang Yun-jeong cut off her mother, who fiercely opposed her marriage to Do Gyeong-wan (shocking update on her mother's whereabouts)."
In the video, Yi Jin-ho said he had personally met and spoken with Jang's mother, and identified the first cause of their conflict as "a money problem."
He said Jang earned vast sums — enough that she would come home from performances carrying bundles of cash — and that her mother had boasted of keeping several sacks of money in the house. "Jang had handed over full control of the household finances to her mother," he said.
Yet the family's wealth shrank rather than grew, Yi said. He explained that Jang's family, a blended household with a complicated set of relatives, had aunts and uncles who extracted money from her under pretexts such as cooking for her or managing her online comments. Her mother, meanwhile, was gambling away funds. "By the time Jang was about to get married, there was nothing left," he said.
Yi identified the second source of conflict as her mother's opposition to the marriage itself. When Jang announced she would marry Do Gyeong-wan, a former TV anchor known for his warm public image and well-regarded family background, her mother mounted fierce resistance. "When I looked into why she opposed someone like Do, it seemed she calculated that if financial control passed to him, nothing would be left for her," Yi said. He added that the mother appeared to have viewed her daughter not as a child but as a source of income, and recalled that around 2010 Jang had been under severe strain — burdened by both personal anguish and financial hardship.
Jang publicly announced her estrangement from her mother, identified as Yuk, more than a decade ago. In 2013, she said that when she tried to settle her finances she discovered that all the money she had earned over 10 years had vanished, and that she had been left with roughly 1 billion won ($643,000) in debt because of Yuk and her younger brother. Yuk and the brother subsequently held a press conference raising various allegations against Jang and filed a lawsuit claiming ownership of her income. The court rejected Yuk's claims, and Jang won a partial victory in a separate suit she filed against her brother seeking the return of funds.
Between 2015 and 2017, Yuk borrowed a total of 415 million won from acquaintances and failed to repay them, leading to her arrest on fraud charges in 2018.
More recently, a criminal complaint was filed with police alleging that Yuk defrauded an acquaintance of tens of millions of won by invoking Jang's name. Police have opened an investigation, but Yuk's whereabouts are currently unknown and she has shown no signs of activity, prompting speculation that something may have happened to her.
paq@heraldcorp.com
