Xdinary Heroes arriving at Gimpo International Airport, May 2025, more than a year before the band’s leader left the group. Photo: TV10, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
On August 13, 2026, JYP Entertainment put out a short statement saying it had “mutually agreed” to end its contract with Gunil (건일), the leader and drummer of the rock band Xdinary Heroes. Forty-eight hours earlier, someone claiming to be his ex-girlfriend had posted online that he privately mocked fans and bandmates, allegedly backed by a leaked recording. The internet did what it does with a story like that: it picked a side fast.
Then Gunil said something that complicates the fast version. In his farewell statement the next day, he admitted the remarks were his, and said they were aimed at “sasaeng” (사생) fans who had broken into the band’s dorm and put a tracking device on his car earlier that year. That single word is the reason this story is worth more than a scroll-past. Most people outside Korea have never heard it, and almost nobody who has heard it knows how far the behavior it describes actually goes.
What actually happened, in order
The JYP Entertainment building in Seoul. JYP is the agency behind Xdinary Heroes, released through its band-focused sub-label Studio J. Photo: DiverseMentality, CC BY-SA, via Openverse
Xdinary Heroes debuted in December 2021 under Studio J, a JYP Entertainment sub-label built around live-instrument bands rather than the usual idol formula. Gunil was the drummer, and he’d been the group’s leader since day one. On August 11, 2026, an anonymous post appeared online from someone identifying herself as his former girlfriend, alleging he’d repeatedly badmouthed fans and members in private. One leaked line reportedly had him saying he wanted to slap them.
JYP didn’t sit on it. Two days later, on August 13, the agency announced it had “determined that continuing group activities with him is no longer feasible” and terminated his exclusive contract by mutual agreement. Xdinary Heroes’ scheduled Summer Sonic performances in Tokyo and Osaka were pulled from the lineup. The band kept going as a five-member group: Jungsu, Gaon, O.de, Jun Han, and Jooyeon.
Gunil’s own statement landed on August 14. He confirmed the remarks were real: “I did make inappropriate remarks toward fans in a phone call that has since been made public,” he said, adding that whatever his reasons, “it does not change the fact that those words came from me.” He didn’t stop there, though. He explained who he’d actually been talking about, and that’s the part that turned a fandom scandal into something worth explaining properly.
Q. What is a sasaeng fan?
A sasaeng fan is a Korean term for a fan whose devotion crosses into surveillance and physical intrusion into a celebrity’s private life. The word itself comes from Korean roots meaning “private life,” and it’s used specifically for behavior that goes past admiration into stalking. That’s the exact definition Korean press used when reporting Gunil’s statement, quoting him as saying sasaeng fans broke into the band’s dorm early in 2026 and attached a GPS tracking device to his personal vehicle. He also said a fresh round of malicious online comments followed the band’s June concert.
To be precise about what’s confirmed and what isn’t: Gunil’s remarks about fans are confirmed, since he admitted them himself. The dorm break-in and the tracker on his car are his account of what happened to him, reported by Korean outlets as his allegation, not as something independently verified by police records in the coverage available. That distinction matters, and it’s exactly the kind of nuance that gets lost when a story like this gets compressed into a headline.
Why an agency would punish the person who got stalked
Xdinary Heroes members greeting fans with a heart hand gesture, May 2025. Idols are expected to hold that public composure toward fans at all times, even the ones behaving badly. Photo: TV10, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Here’s the part that trips people up: JYP didn’t terminate Gunil for being tracked and broken in on. It terminated him for how he talked about the people doing it, in a private call that became public. That looks unfair on the surface (punish the victim, ignore the stalker) but it’s actually consistent with how K-pop agencies have handled this exact tension for years. Idols are contractually required to maintain a certain public composure toward fans, including the ones behaving badly, because a company’s entire business is built on parasocial trust between artist and audience. Once that trust is visibly broken, even by someone who was genuinely wronged, the agency treats the breach as the bigger threat to the group than the original harassment.
That’s the real discovery buried in this story. Most explainers about sasaeng fans stop at “obsessive fans do scary things.” The sharper point is that being a victim of sasaeng behavior doesn’t buy an idol any slack for how he responds to it in private. The agency’s calculus runs on the artist’s public conduct, not on who provoked what. It’s a genuinely uncomfortable trade-off, and it’s exactly why a case like Gunil’s belongs in any real explanation of what the term “sasaeng” actually costs people.
This isn’t a one-off. It’s a documented pattern
A commercial GPS vehicle tracker, shown here for illustration only, not the specific device involved in Gunil’s case, but representative of the kind of hardware Korean press has reported sasaeng fans attaching to idols’ vehicles. Photo: TudorTulok (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons
Gunil’s account of a GPS tracker on his car isn’t an outlier claim. It matches a pattern that’s been reported around K-pop for well over a decade. A GPS tracker was found on a vehicle transporting the group The Boyz in late 2024. During a Paris promotional stop, a miniature GPS device was found attached to a car carrying members of the group CORTIS. Actor Jang Geun-suk has said sasaeng bugged his own car with a GPS unit. Further back, EXO’s dorm was broken into and vans were fitted with trackers, and TVXQ’s Yunho was hospitalized in 2006 after an anti-fan gave him a drink laced with glue.
South Korea’s stalking law gives a sense of how seriously the country now treats this on paper: a stalking conviction can bring up to three years in prison or a fine of up to 30 million won, roughly $21,500, and if a weapon or dangerous item is involved, that rises to up to five years in prison or a fine of up to 50 million won. There’s also a documented, decade-old cottage industry around it. “Sasaeng taxis,” hired specifically to chase the vans transporting idols, have been reported charging fans somewhere between $200 and $600 a day, with drivers reportedly pushing speeds as high as 200 km/h to keep up. Those figures come from Korean entertainment reporting going back to 2012 and are still cited consistently by outlets covering the phenomenon today, though the specific numbers weren’t something this article could re-verify against a live source in this pass.
The fans doing this are a small fraction of the fandom
A K-pop fan crowd at KCON, the ordinary scale of the fandom that sasaeng behavior gets confused with. Photo: Peter Kaminski, CC BY, via Openverse
It’s worth saying plainly, because the term gets thrown around loosely online: showing up early to a fan meeting, buying every album variant, or camping outside a venue for a legitimate ticketed event is not sasaeng behavior. It’s ordinary, if intense, fandom, and it’s the overwhelming majority of what any K-pop crowd actually looks like. Sasaeng specifically means crossing into surveillance and physical intrusion: tracking someone’s flights, hacking their schedule, entering private spaces they haven’t opened to the public. The word describes specific conduct, not a synonym for “cares a lot.”
That distinction is exactly what Gunil tried to draw in his own statement. He said the remarks targeted “some malicious fans who invaded my privacy,” not the fanbase broadly, and apologized to “everyone who was disappointed or hurt” regardless. Whether that clarification saves his career or not, it’s the correct way to read a story like this: the behavior that provoked him is real and documented across the industry, and the consequence he faced is also real, and the two facts sit side by side without canceling each other out.
The short version
- JYP Entertainment terminated Xdinary Heroes leader Gunil’s contract on August 13, 2026, after leaked remarks about fans and bandmates surfaced.
- Gunil confirmed the remarks the next day and said they targeted “sasaeng” fans, a Korean term for obsessive fans whose behavior crosses into stalking and privacy invasion, who he said broke into the band’s dorm and put a GPS tracker on his car earlier in 2026.
- GPS trackers on idols’ vehicles are a documented, recurring pattern (The Boyz, CORTIS, and others), not a one-off claim.
- South Korea’s stalking law carries penalties up to five years in prison or a 50 million won fine when a weapon is involved.
- Xdinary Heroes continues as a five-member group. The agency’s decision punished how Gunil responded to sasaeng behavior, not the behavior itself.
Gaon, one of the five members Xdinary Heroes continues with after Gunil’s August 2026 departure. Photo: KNTV, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Jungsu, another of the five members Xdinary Heroes continues with. Photo: KNTV, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Q. Is Gunil completely gone from Xdinary Heroes?
Yes. JYP’s August 13 statement terminated his exclusive contract, and Gunil’s own farewell statement the next day confirmed he was leaving the group. Xdinary Heroes continues as a five-member band with Jungsu, Gaon, O.de, Jun Han, and Jooyeon.
Q. Was Gunil actually a victim of sasaeng behavior, or is that just an excuse?
What’s confirmed is that he made the remarks, since he admitted that himself. What’s reported as his account, not independently verified in available coverage, is the specific claim that sasaeng fans broke into the dorm and placed a tracker on his car. Both things can be true at once: he may well have been genuinely stalked, and he’s still being held responsible for what he said about it in private.
Q. Are sasaeng fans a small group, or is this common across K-pop?
It’s a small, extreme fraction of any fandom, but the industry-wide pattern of documented incidents is long: GPS trackers, dorm break-ins, hired taxis built to chase idol vans. The behavior is rare per fan but has shown up around enough different groups over enough years that agencies build entire security and legal strategies around it.
Q. Could someone actually be prosecuted for sasaeng behavior in Korea?
Yes, under South Korea’s stalking punishment law, which allows up to three years in prison or a fine of up to 30 million won for a conviction, rising to up to five years or a 50 million won fine when a weapon or dangerous item is involved. Whether any specific sasaeng incident results in prosecution depends on it being reported and pursued through that legal process.
If you’re curious how JYP has handled other recent, murkier fan-facing controversies, we’ve also looked at what JYP has actually confirmed, and not confirmed, about Stray Kids’ status in 2026, which runs into the same problem this story does: separating what an agency has said from what fans have assumed. And for a lighter look at how a K-pop group’s public image gets built in the first place, here’s what each BLACKPINK member did in the six months after their last tour ended.
Not every gesture from a fan is invasive. On the opposite end of what this article describes is fan rice — stacked rice bags decorated with ribbons and a member’s photo, donated to rice charities in an idol’s name. The tradition traces back to a 2007 concert for singer Shin Hye-sung, and it’s still one of the most common ways Korean fandoms show support: same devotion, a completely different outcome.
A Korean cafe, the kind of space fandoms rent out whole for an idol’s birthday. Photo: Jirka Matousek, CC BY 2.0, via Openverse
Fan rice is one form that healthier devotion takes. Another, far more common one runs through food and coffee directly. Korean fandoms regularly rent out an entire cafe for an idol’s birthday, decorate it with custom snacks, drinks and photo displays, and turn the whole thing into a day-long open house fans can walk into. Search the Korean term saeng-il cafe (birthday cafe) and Instagram turns up tens of thousands of posts, often dozens of separate cafe takeovers for a single idol’s birthday, organized independently by different fan groups. The same organizing energy shows up as coffee trucks and food trucks parked outside filming sets and concert venues, paid for out of pooled fan funds and sent with a banner carrying the idol’s name, usually to feed the staff and crew rather than the idol directly. It’s the same devotion that produces sasaeng behavior at its worst, running through a cafe order instead of a GPS tracker.
Sources: The Korea Herald (Aug 13 & 14, 2026) · Korea JoongAng Daily (Aug 13 & 14, 2026) · The Korea Times (Aug 14, 2026) · Soompi · Forbes (Aug 13, 2026) · allkpop · Wikipedia (Xdinary Heroes, Sasaeng fan) · en.koreadaily.com (CORTIS GPS tracking report) · Asia Business Daily.