Look out, kid, they keep it all hid
Imagine a girl in her young teens; her mother and father are fundamentally kind and supportive. Occasionally, there will be a strange, hard-to-interpret interchange between the two, one or both of them disturbed about something. But in general, this is her family: when she comes home there's mommy and daddy. And then one day, out of nowhere, the announcement, "Daddy is moving out." Or, "We've decided to separate." Along with denial and guilt ("maybe if I'd behaved better they'd have stayed married"), the girl starts to ask why. "Why did you and daddy break up?" But the answers she gets are always vague, stuff about not getting along or wanting to follow different paths, never any details and never a real story. Unless there's something specific that provides a (pseudo) explanation, such as a new boyfriend, the question, "What happened?," will never get an answer. The kid doesn't understand that, her parents being decent people, neither is going to say, "These are the things your mom did wrong," or "This is why I'm disappointed in your dad and in my life." No one will bring up the extramarital affair, or the dead sex life, or the compulsive spending. -Right, there are plenty of parents who will tell all, to the children, to the lawyers, to the judge, but in my story the parents aren't the sort to do that.
What some of the fans don't understand is that Hwayoung's not going to get up and tell the world, "Here are the ways they treated me unfairly; and this is what Jiyeon did and what Eunjung said, and this is where I felt cast aside," or anything like that. It'd be like trying to hurt each other further. And the remaining members of T-ara aren't going to say, "This is what happened," because to do so would be to compound the original horrible insinuations of Kim Kwang Soo when he fired Hwayoung and implied that it was owing to her continual mistreatment of staff.
Even if Hwayoung or T-ara have moments when they want to tell the world, there's no way any of them can look good doing so. They'll just look like they're trying to restart the war.
Not that my analogy - kid trying to comprehend her parents' breakup, fans trying to comprehend Hwayoung's departure - applies to most of the Netizens who are keeping the uproar going. Some are curious, combative, or just want a story that makes sense. And those who say they want to know the truth about T-ara, want to know if there really was bullying (or if there was any more bullying, since they've already taken the July 25th tweets and the out-of-context video excerpts as proof of bullying): they aren't like a kid trying to understand but are rather like a conspiracy theorist who wants to sustain and nurture his own sense of T-ara as wicked and of both T-ara and Core Contents Media as fundamentally fraudulent. He'll never want to believe he's got the real story, because embedded in his sense of this world is the idea that whatever he's told, something will have been left out, some crime or some bad behavior. No matter what is said, he'll find it incomplete or evasive.
These musings were inspired by the comment thread to this allkpop post, T-ara members share their feelings on the situation that unfolded with Hwayoung's departure. (A very rough translation of the show is here, only the first few paragraphs touching on the Hwayoung business.) Was the show really called "T-ara Confession"? If so, no wonder viewers were disappointed. I wonder if it was MNet that chose the title. If it was Core Contents Media, what were they thinking? (Maybe they could change the company's name to "What Were They Thinking Entertainment.") Quote from Jiyeon: "T-ara to me is like Homework. It's because I've a lot of things to do, hence all of it is homework. Because there are a lot of things to do in the future." And Hyomin says, emblematically, "We want to perform better, must be more hardworking" - the only response they really seem to have in their arsenal.