David Choe needs to accept responsibility for his sexism, anti-Blackness, and we need to be normalizing enthusiastic consent

I’m still processing the resurfacing of David Choe’s podcast episode with Asa Akira from 2014 where he tells a story he later claimed was fiction of raping a Black massage therapist (Choe, at least in 2014, tried to argue that it wasn’t rape because she eventually “liked” it). I hadn’t heard of David Choe until seeing him in Ugly Delicious (food documentary on Netflix with host David Chang in an episode with Steven Yeun on BBQ around the world) and forgot about who he was and his appearance in that until Beef came out. The snippets of the podcast episode are new to me. There was criticism of him back in 2014. (See articles by Jenn Fang here and here.) I’m frustrated at Choe and everyone who could have looked up Choe’s past before casting him in this show because these comments, without atonement or restorative justice or deeper acknowledgement of why he made them (Choe mentioned “shock value” back then, apparently), take away from the positive impact of the show. We can try to separate the art from the artist, but only so much.

I don’t know whose job it is to research the people they cast (I’d hope that’s part of a casting director’s job), but I’d think someone who handles casting decisions at Netflix, A24, and the executive producers should be able to at least search for controversy in the past that might distract from the impact of the show. They could have easily cast anyone else and we could focus…