“Beef” actor David Choe is under fire for a resurfaced podcast interview from 2014 in which he discusses sexually assaulting a masseuse, a story he later claimed was made up.
Choe’s comments have resurfaced in the aftermath of his role as Isaac Cho in the recently released Netflix show “Beef,” which stars Ali Wong and Steven Yuen and has received critical acclaim.
The clip, which has gone viral since the premiere of the hit Netflix show on April 6, shows Choe getting an erection during a massage and performing sex acts in front of and with the masseuse, whom he refers to as Rose.
According to transcripts of the video published by BuzzFeed News after its initial release in 2014, Choe described masturbating during the massage and forcing Rose to participate in a sex act she was “definitely not into,” admitting that this was “rapey behavior,” but denying that he was a rapist.
The full interview from Choe’s podcast, DVDASA, was posted to Twitter by journalist Aura Bogado, who tweeted on Sunday that it had been removed after someone identifying himself as Choe requested that the video be removed on copyright grounds. Bogado also tweeted a TikTok clip of the interview, which she claims was removed for violating community guidelines.
Choe describes the masseuse as “half Black, half White” in interview clips that have remained on social media, and recalls being excited by “the thrill of possibly going to jail.”
“You’re basically telling us that you’re a rapist now, and the only way to get your dick really hard is rape,” Asa Akira, the podcast’s co-host, says, to which Choe responds, “Yeah,” before referring to himself as “a successful rapist.”
Following the interview’s criticism in 2014, Choe posted a statement to the podcast’s now-defunct website in which he denied being a rapist and claimed that the story was not factual or “a representation of my reality,” according to BuzzFeed News.
Choe, a successful graffiti artist, issued another statement about the interview in 2017 on Instagram after a mural he painted in New York City was spray-painted with the word “rapist.” Choe denied the story he told on his podcast occurred at the time, writing that he had “ZERO history of sexual assault.”
