What happened when Jessica Jung left Girls' Generation?

In 2014, Jessica Jung left/was kicked out from the K-pop group Girls' Generation, after 7 years together. The group hasn't said one word about it since, and when they talk about their history they do it like Jessica Jung was never there. This smells like big company damage control, personal feelings and perhaps breaking of some cultural taboos, and it's not always easy to know who's telling the truth and when. There are some tweets from Jessica Jung and some official statements from SM Entertainment (the company behind Girls' Generation) that you can look up if you want to, and I've used those together with Jessica Jung's book "Bright" to try to figure out the truth. No big scoop here, I'm just concluding what parts of an already accepted story I'm the most sure about, the reasoning behind them and what happened after.

Here's what I believe: Jessica's tweet about her being forced out is her being genuine and telling exactly what happened. SM Entertainment's response is them trying to save their faces with a classic damage control "lie", where they don't deny Jessica's statement completely (because that would be too obvious), but still sprinkle some untrue statements on top of it that benefit themselves. The reasons leading up to all of this happening - according to the book: the members being upset with Jessica spending more time on her fashion brand instead of on her group, and therefore building a pact together to threat SM with something they would do or not do if Jessica doesn't leave the group - sound plausible, but could lack details or be exaggerated or could also be something completely else. Assuming that's what happened, the question is if she was actually bullied or if the members had a good reason for doing this. I rarely think one part (Jessica?) is completely innocent while the other part (the rest of Girls' Generation?) is evil, and of course Jessica would deny her own faults in the situation if she had any, just like any sane person would, but I actually believe Jessica's story is the most true. No overwhealming evidence of Jessica Jung being anything else than a good person has come to the surface in 10 years, which says something. I mean, almost everyone get these rumours if they're famous enough.

The way Jessica's book "Bright" described SM Entertainment's handling of the situation, where they first want to handle the 8 members' ultimatum gracefully and, in some compromising half-hearted way, please everyone by removing Jessica from the group but letting her stay under the company to do other endeavours, provided they all agree on playing it out nicely and keeping quite about all this drama, sounds very realistic. It checks too many boxes of my experience with how companies operate in the world to be completely fictional: You know, when they look good on the surface but are a completely different company behind closed doors, and have BIG incentives to keep those details behind those doors to maintain their image, and seem to be controlled mostly by a fear of losing business opportunities - that may not even objectively make sense but are rather created by a bureaucratic system that wants to preserve itself - more than they're being ruled by an evil CEO. The "evil CEO" sounds more intriguing, but it's probably closer to the truth to assume a boring bureaucratic company culture where every single person justs wants to save their face. Many other parts of the book are clearly constructed and made-up to make the story interesting, but this part doesn't have the typical dramaturgy where everything is black or white and good vs evil like in a fairytale. It's a bit too undramatic to be made-up. There may be some details missing, but if she were to completely make up a story - perhaps to make herself look more like the victim - would she really come up with this story where SM Entertainment actually looks a little _less_ shady than you could imagine, where they actually want to keep quiet and maintain a good relationship despite the situation?

And, following this, Jessica completely disregards SM Entertainments "let's keep it quiet and play it out nicely" demands, and releases her own public statement with her honest feelings about what truly happened. Which explains the "blacklisting" part - where Jessica Jung is seemingly banned from all Korean music & entertainment shows, and effectively from the Korean music industry, since this happened. This confused me at first, because a lot of members have left a lot of k-pop groups without making that kind of thing of it. You know where they actually can and do talk about it. So how could Jessica become "blacklisted" if she only left/was kicked out of Girls' Generation due to conflict of interest when she started to focus more on her fasion brand (which was one of the official storylines at the time)? There must have been something more going on behind the scenes, and yeah, going against a company by not keeping quiet sounds like a typical thing that can cause such reactions. There may be personal aspects involved, like Jessica Jung just making Lee Soo-Man legitimately mad, but it could also just be normal organizational damage control.

So, now you can stop with the "we will never truly know what happened"s and with the dramatic conspiracies that somehow always show your favorite member(s) as the hero. The most probable explanation isn't necessarily the most dramatic or interesting one, in this case it was probably just like how Jessica Jung wrote about it in "Bright", minus the "Mean Girls" drama and romance.

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