Mark Lee’s Label UPPER ROOM Vows Legal Action Against Malicious Posts Targeting the Star
Mark Lee’s independent agency UPPER ROOM has drawn a hard line against online harassment aimed at its founding artist.
On September 2, the label confirmed it will pursue legal action against posts and comments it considers slanderous, false, or otherwise damaging to Mark’s personal rights — a move that lands just as the former NCT member gears up for his first solo comeback since leaving SM Entertainment.
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What UPPER ROOM Announced
The statement came directly from Summer, UPPER ROOM’s in-house lawyer, who confirmed that the company would pursue formal legal measures against malicious content circulating about Mark across social media and online communities.
According to the label, it has been quietly tracking this kind of activity since UPPER ROOM was founded earlier this year, and the pattern it describes covers several categories: slanderous claims, fabricated information, posts that infringe on Mark’s personal rights, and cyberbullying more broadly.
Rather than leading with a threat, the announcement opened on a warmer note — thanking fans for their excitement over Mark’s upcoming single. Only after that did the label pivot to the more serious matter of online abuse, framing the legal step as something taken reluctantly and out of necessity rather than as a first resort.
One detail stood out across every outlet that picked up the story: the label says Mark himself is less troubled by the harassment’s effect on him personally than by the emotional toll it takes on his fans.
UPPER ROOM leaned on that point to justify the legal escalation, positioning the action as protective of the fan community as much as of the artist. That framing is a departure from the more common “agency defends artist” narrative that usually accompanies these statements, and it’s part of why the announcement has resonated with fans online.
Why the Timing Matters
The legal action announcement didn’t arrive in isolation — it landed on the same day UPPER ROOM confirmed Mark’s new single, “My Friend,” will release on September 10 at 1 p.m. KST, alongside a music video teaser posted to the label’s YouTube channel.
It’s his first new music in roughly seventeen months and his first public solo release since exiting NCT 127 and NCT Dream.
That context matters for understanding why the label chose to address online hate now. Comeback periods tend to generate spikes in both fan engagement and targeted harassment, as renewed public attention pulls in more commentary, speculation, and, inevitably, bad-faith content.
By pairing a warm, appreciative message about the single with a pointed warning about legal consequences, UPPER ROOM appears to be trying to protect the moment rather than let it get overshadowed by a separate controversy.
A New Label Still Finding Its Footing
UPPER ROOM is Mark Lee’s own company, formed after he closed out a decade-long run with SM Entertainment.
His contract with SM concluded in early April, and with it came the end of his time in NCT, NCT 127, and NCT Dream — groups he’d been part of since debuting as a trainee out of SM’s Vancouver audition process back in 2012.
In a farewell letter posted to Instagram, Mark reflected on the ten years since his 2016 debut, thanking members and fans for the journey while signaling he was ready to build something of his own.
That “something of his own” turned out to be UPPER ROOM, a company Mark launched on June 4 with a base in Seoul’s Mapo-gu district, where he serves as co-CEO rather than simply a signed artist — giving him direct influence over how the company handles situations like this one.
It’s a structural difference worth noting: unlike a traditional idol-label relationship, decisions about how aggressively to pursue legal action against online harassment are, at least in part, decisions Mark has a hand in shaping himself.
The early goodwill around that launch was considerable. Days before the wardrobe controversy broke, Mark represented the label on an international stage, performing for the United Nations Environment Programme at a World Environment Day event in Baku.
The kind of appearance that framed him as a globally minded artist stepping confidently into independence.
That momentum stalled less than three weeks later. In late June, UPPER ROOM found itself managing a self-inflicted controversy after it posted, then quickly deleted, photos of Mark wearing a Confederate flag shirt at a fan event.
The company issued an apology explaining the garment had been chosen as a vintage wardrobe piece without full awareness of its symbolism, and pledged to tighten its internal review process for wardrobe and content approval going forward.
Weeks later, Mark addressed the incident himself in an Instagram Live, speaking directly to his Black fans and the broader Black community and asking for space to rebuild trust.
The episode drew criticism at the time, including questions about why the initial apology came from the label rather than from Mark directly, and about whether a young, independent company had the internal safeguards to catch this kind of issue before it reached the public.
We covered that fallout in detail at the time, including how the label’s own statement raised as many questions as it answered — read our full breakdown of the Confederate flag controversy here.
Viewed alongside that earlier stumble, this week’s legal action announcement reads as part of a broader pattern: a young company that is actively adjusting how it communicates and how it protects its artist and fanbase as it learns the ropes of operating independently, outside the infrastructure of a major agency like SM.
The Cyberbullying Landscape UPPER ROOM Is Responding To
Harassment campaigns targeting K-pop artists are hardly new, but they tend to escalate around specific flashpoints — comebacks, personal controversies, or perceived slights toward other fandoms.
Mark’s situation carries a few of these at once: a high-profile exit from one of SM’s flagship franchises, a wardrobe controversy that drew genuine backlash, and now a comeback that’s reintroducing him to public scrutiny as a solo act for the first time.
UPPER ROOM’s statement doesn’t specify particular platforms or communities where it has observed the harassment, nor does it detail what legal remedies it intends to pursue — whether that means defamation suits, platform takedown requests, or police reports for the more severe cases of cyberbullying.
What is clear is that the label is treating this as an ongoing pattern rather than a one-off incident, describing a monitoring effort that has apparently been running since the company’s founding.
This mirrors a step UPPER ROOM reportedly took earlier in the year, when it set up a dedicated channel for fans to report defamation and harmful content after a wave of TikTok posts falsely linked Mark to cult involvement, misreading references to his Christian faith in his music and public statements.
Fans at the time praised the label’s quick response, and that same instinct — react visibly rather than let harmful narratives sit unaddressed — appears to be driving this latest legal announcement as well.
What Fans Are Saying
Reaction to the announcement has been largely supportive so far. Commentary circulating on X and other platforms frames the move as evidence that Mark now has an agency willing to act quickly on his behalf, a point some fans contrast favorably with how these situations were sometimes handled during his time at SM.
That said, the goodwill isn’t unconditional — the Confederate flag shirt incident is still fresh enough that some fans are likely to judge this latest statement partly on whether the label follows through with concrete legal steps rather than just words.
The Bigger Picture
For an agency that’s not yet a year old, UPPER ROOM is being tested in real time on two fronts simultaneously: proving it can protect Mark from the harassment that comes with public life, and proving it has learned from its own early misstep with the wardrobe controversy.
How the label follows up on this legal action pledge — whether with visible takedowns, public updates on cases, or continued silence once the news cycle moves on — will say a lot about whether “artist protection” at UPPER ROOM is a lasting policy or a one-time response to a specific wave of harassment.
In the meantime, all eyes turn to September 10, when “My Friend” arrives as the first real marker of what Mark Lee’s solo career looks like outside the group and label system that defined the first decade of his career.