The details surrounding the Justin Lee (李宗瑞) photo sex scandal continue to unravel, which has Taiwan’s entertainment world on edge. As of press time, Lee, a socialite and son of a prominent businessman, remains in hiding amid allegations that he drugged and raped a woman and also secretly filmed his bedroom trysts with a number of models and actresses.
The scandal has predictably caused a media feeding frenzy, and the first casualties have included Lee’s father, Lee Yueh-tsang (李岳蒼) who got sacked from his position as director of Yuanta Financial Holdings (元大金融控股公司) as a result of all the bad press.
Then there’s model Maggie Wu (吳亞馨), who was discovered to be a former girlfriend of Lee’s and is allegedly one of the subjects of his sex tapes circulating the Internet. Last weekend, Wu dramatically canceled a press conference at the last minute, leaving her agency to explain to reporters that she had been overwhelmed by the media attention.
Photo: Taipei Times
And the circus has started to spread. Entertainers, many of them star-wanna-bes, have been emerging out of the woodwork to distance themselves from Lee, barring the odd case of Joyce Lai (賴慕禎), who claimed to be Lee’s current girlfriend. That caught the attention of Taipei investigators, who went to her home in Tainan to question her, only to find out that she was a wanted drug dealer who had been ducking a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence she received in 2009. (She finally reported to prison several days after her meeting with the police.) It turns out that while on the lam, Lai had been pursuing an entertainment career and had appeared on a number of variety shows in recent years under the name Sun Ming (孫明).
One up-and-coming entertainer that has been trying to dodge the spotlight is Shawn Chien (簡翔棋), a Channel V VJ who goes by the stage name Hsiao Ma (小馬). He has been tagged by the media as one of Lee’s close nightclub cohorts, as well as a “middleman” who introduced a number of actresses to Lee. Hsiao Ma, who has denied the allegations, was also set to hold a press conference but canceled at the last minute, telling reporters at a recent TV taping that the matter was no longer open for discussion.
All the attention placed on Lee and B-list riff-raff has annoyed TV variety show host Hsu Nai-lin (徐乃麟). The crusty middle-aged entertainer lamented on a TV appearance that people who claim to be in “show business” but haven’t done anything of substance (such as Joyce Lai) are giving the industry a bad name. Hsu also decried the police investigation as “detestable” for not having done enough to protect entertainers’ rights to privacy.
Photo: Taipei Times
In other news, a new battle is brewing over Saturday night TV variety show ratings. Chu Ko Liang’s (豬哥亮) Wan Xiu Zhu Wang (萬秀豬王), which premiered last weekend, beat out Hu Gua’s (胡瓜) SuperStar (明日之星), which has long held the top spot.
The win has been bittersweet for the 65-year-old Chu, who went into hiding in southern Taiwan after amassing huge gambling debts in the 1990s and made a comeback just several years ago. Days before his new show aired last weekend, Chu revealed that he has been estranged from his daughter, singer Jeannie Hsieh (謝金燕), for a decade.
This prompted criticism that the announcement was a ploy to gain sympathy and boost ratings for the new show.
Chu tearfully denied the accusation, and told reporters that once he clears his debts (which he says will take another year), he intends to buy an apartment for his wife and children.
Meanwhile, Hua Gua put on a brave face over getting bumped to second place. “It doesn’t matter who wins or loses, the programs are all about long-term endurance, not just the ratings for one episode,” he said.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
RSS