‘Beef’ Star David Choe Trying to Scrub Internet of Clips About His ‘Rapey Behavior’

David Choe, star of the new Netflix hit Beef, has been the subject of criticism since last week, when a clip of him describing committing sexual assault began to go viral. Now, the actor and artist is reportedly issuing takedown notices of the snippet, which was from a 2014 podcast episode, in an effort to purge the internet of his account of his own “rapey behavior.”

On Tuesday, Motherboard, Variety, and NBC News reported that two Twitter users—Aura Bogado and Meecham Whitson Meriwhether—re-posted the clip, only to have their tweets removed, after Choe filed a report with Twitter, claiming he was the copyright holder of the video. Ironically, in Choe’s initial request for removal, he wrote that the clip—in which he details a nonconsensual situation—had been shared “without our consent.”

“We would like to have these videos removed immediately,” the request read, citing critical tweets from Meriweather and Bogado.

“It’s just so strange to me,” Meriweather told NBC News of his tweets being removed, noting that it was emblematic of how survivors and their allies are often silenced. “We are no longer believing our eyes and our ears when it’s right in front of us.”

In the clip that sparked the controversy, from an episode of his now-defunct podcast DVDASA (Double Vag, Double Anal, Sensitive Artist) entitled “Erection Quest,” Choe describes an instance in which he forced oral sex from a masseuse at a massage parlor.

“I’m getting turned on just telling this story,” he tells his co-host and adult film actor Asa Akira. “I just take her hand and I put it on my dick. She just holds it there.”

“She’s in denial,” Choe continues. “So I go, ‘Can I help you?’ And she’s like, ‘All right, all right.’ So now I’m holding her hand around my dick, and I start jerking my dick off. I was like, ‘Spit on it.’ She’s like, ‘Uhh, no. I don’t wanna do that.’ I was like, ‘No, spit on my dick.’ She’s like, ‘No. This is crazy.’ She’s definitely not into it, but she’s not stopping it either. She won’t spit on it, so I was like, ‘Kiss it.’ She’s like ‘No, there’s all the oil.’”

“I take the back of her head and I push it down on my dick, and she doesn’t do it, and I go, ‘Open your mouth,’ and she does it, and then I start face-fucking her.”

Akira, for her part, makes plain the only logical response: “You’re basically telling us that you’re a rapist right now, and the only way to get your dick hard is rape.”

“Yeah,” Choe agrees before clarifying that actually, he doesn’t believe he’s a rapist: “I just want to make it clear that I admit that that’s rapey behavior, but I’m not a rapist.”

Choe did not respond to Jezebel’s request for comment.

While his Beef co-stars have remained silent about the resurfaced clip (much to the chagrin of multiple fans), Choe has previously acknowledged his comments, first in 2014:

I never thought I’d wake up one late afternoon and hear myself called a rapist. It sucks. Especially because I am not one. I am not a rapist. I hate rapists, I think rapists should be raped and murdered.

I am an artist and a storyteller and I view my show DVDASA as a complete extension of my art.

If I am guilty of anything, it’s bad storytelling in the style of douche. Just like many of my paintings are often misinterpreted, the same goes with my show. The main objective of all of my podcasts is to challenge and provoke my friends and the co-stars on the show. We fuck with each other, entertain ourselves and laugh at each other. It’s a dark, tasteless, completely irreverent show where we fuck with everyone listening, but mostly ourselves. We create stories and tell tales. It’s not a news show. It’s not a representation of my reality. It’s not the place to come for reliable information about me or my life. It’s my version of reality, it’s art that sometimes offends people. I’m sorry if anyone believed that the stories were fact. They were not!

In a world full of horrible people, thank god for us.

Then he did so again in a 2017 Instagram post, which read, in part: “Though I said those words, I did not commit those actions. It did not happen. I have ZERO history of sexual assault. I am deeply sorry for any hurt I’ve brought to anyone through my past words. Non-consensual sex is rape and it is never funny or appropriate to joke about.”

It should go without saying that whether Choe’s inexcusable story is true, or simply an attempt to “entertain” himself, it’s profoundly bleak either way—as are his bizarre “apologies.”