Assault of Maho Yamaguchi

On January 8, 2019, Maho Yamaguchi alleged in her Showroom live stream and Twitter that on December 8, 2018, two men (identified by press as two fans, one unemployed and the other a university student, both 25-year old[1]) after hiding in an apartment on the other side which was previously occupied by another member, had tried to break into her personal apartment as she was entering her apartment after prying open her door. The men grasped her face and tried to pin her on the ground, shutting her mouth with their hand as she was calling for help, only to be stopped by the intervention of a building resident who came to the floor in question from the elevator.[2][3][4][5][6] The men were arrested by the police and were released from custody 20 days later without prosecution.[4] They were reported as having denied Yamaguchi's description of events, claiming that they "just wanted to talk."[4] A third male accomplice was also involved.[7][8] Early reports on the incident also mentioned how the building in question was intended by the NGT48 management as a surrogate for a dormitory, for those members coming from outside of the Niigata prefecture,[9] and that the building was furnished with an automatic lock at the entrance,[10] raising questions on the way the perpetrators could have easily gained free access inside.
Yamaguchi had brought the incident to the attention of the management of NGT48, but after a month of silence, she decided to bring the issue to the public.[11][5] After her live stream was cut abruptly, Yamaguchi posted several since-deleted tweets detailing her account and claiming that others NGT48 members leaked her personal information to her assailants, including her own address.[2][4] The disclosure came in after one month of Yamaguchi's virtual absence from almost all of group-related activities in NGT48, which worried fans.[12]

During the group's third anniversary theater show on January 10, Yamaguchi publicly apologized for "causing trouble" by speaking out.[11][5] Shortly after, Yamaguchi and Team N3 member Ayaka Tano were absent from NGT48's performance on January 12; Team G member Riko Sugahara was also missing, citing illness.[13] A petition on Change.org calling for the resignation of NGT48 director Etsuro Imamura gained over 53,000 signatures before closing on January 13.[5]

NGT48's management initially denied that NGT48 members had disclosed Yamaguchi's personal information.[14] On January 14, AKS issued an apology and later confirmed that a member shared information after being accosted by the men, but they also stated that "nothing illegal" had happened and that she was unimplicated in their attack.[11] On the same day, Imamura was transferred to AKS' Tokyo headquarters and was replaced by Maiko Hayakawa, with Tsuyoshi Okada to fill in the new figure of vice theater manager.[11][15] At the yearly Coming of Age ceremony of the AKB48 Groups, held January 14, 2019, after the new management executives made their first public appearance, Hayakawa's appointment as the new theater manager of NGT48 was explained as "being Hayakawa a woman, she understands the positions other women are in".[16] Alarms and counseling services were provided to NGT48 members.[7][17][18] Several news reports stated that there was animosity between Team NIII and Team G members,[8] especially after Yamaguchi had allegedly reported a member for not upholding the group's no-dating rule.[19][20] Team NIII members Tano and Marina Nishigata were questioned by the police; both denied assisting Yamaguchi's attackers.[21] From January 17 to 19, Tokyo Sports published allegations that a female manager with the surname Kitagawa had vouched for Yamaguchi's safety after the December 8 incident, but was also harassed by Yamaguchi's attackers and fired by the NGT48 management on December 31, 2018.[22] Tokyo Sports later withdrew the articles on January 20 after NGT48's lawyer denied the statement.[22][23]

On January 31, the NGT48 management announced the formation of an independent third-party committee consisting of a lawyers from Iwasaki Law, Akasaka Mori no Ki Law, and Shinwa Law regarding the implication of other NGT48 members and the research of the root causes behind the incident.[24] [25][26] On March 21, 2019 the third-party committee concluded the research. They report was released on NGT48's website, which communicated that, while up to 12 members were alleged to fraternize with fans, it couldn't be determined NGT48 members were implicated in the assault in itself, and it was caused by "excessive behavior from some fans,"[27] aggravated by the poor civil infrastructure of Niigata making the members easier to locate.[28][29]

The third party committee's report also pointed out issues concerning the closeness between fans and members. This included members being accosted by an accomplice of the two main assailants, and holding conversations with him revealing details concerning the actions of many other members; members having been meeting individually with such man various times already in the past; and the assailant group being reported to have been renting apartments in three other building complexes across Niigata other than the one of the incident, in order to meet with other members inside. In addition, the document contained sparse quotes from an audio recordings data, submitted to the committee possibly by Yamaguchi, of a conversation from when the AKS staff and Yamaguchi questioned the culprits for informations, on the day of the incident. In it, regarding the process through which the number of Yamaguchi's apartment came to be known to him, one assailant was found claiming that they had asked about it to several other members much in advance.[30]

The day after, on March 22, 2019, a press conference was then held in the city of Niigata. While watching the press conference that followed (held by AKS board director Takumi Matsumura, NGT48 theater manager Maiko Hayakawa, and vice theater manager Tsuyoshi Okada but notably without any members of the third-party committee present, as it is instead the norm[31]) Yamaguchi criticized the outcome live on Twitter as she categorically denied Matsumura's claims.[32] To Matsumura's initial decision to give a pardon to all members who had partaken in personal associations with fans,[33] Yamaguchi also revealed that he informed her the investigation was to identify the members fraternizing with fans and that they would be fired.[34] [33][35] In response to Matsumura repeatedly alleging that fraternizing with fans consisted of exchanging greetings on the street, she also decried it as an arbitrary interpretration of his nowhere to be found in the report, and revealed that some members had actually admitted to having had intimate affairs with the attackers' group.[36][37][27][38][39]
Yamaguchi also revealed that Matsumura had pressured her to apologize in January 2019 and she had eventually done so to ensure that the other members would not have to apologize in her stead, later revealizing in a separate tweet the apology script she was originally requested to recite.[34][36][40][41]

Maho Yamaguchi (山口 真帆, Yamaguchi Maho, born September 17, 1995) is a Japanese actress and former singer. At the time of the assault, she was a member of NGT48 and was the co-captain of the group's Team G.[49] After leaving the group on May 18, 2019, she signed with Ken-On as an actress.[50]

On May 1, 2019, AKS, the company that oversees the AKB48 Groups, filed a lawsuit against Yamaguchi's assailants for 30 million yen, claiming that the scandal has disrupted their events and caused them a loss of 100 million yen.[51] The lawsuit complaint contained a transcript of the recorded conversation that Yamaguchi and AKS staff had with the two men on the day of the incident, in which the two assailants spoke that they had a consultation with other members in advance on how to meet with Yamaguchi. In addition, they talked about maintaining private associations with as many as 8 of the other members in NGT48. According to the claims of AKS, all of this caused a relationship of trust to collapse, both between the members and by the members towards the agency itself.[52]
The first session of the oral proceedings, held on July 10, 2019, ended with the defendants refusing to respond at first (they would later participate but without showing in court once).[53] At the press scrum held at the end of the session, AKS' attorney, Kazuhiro Endo, revealed also that the point of the trial wasn't to claim money, but rather to elucidate on the truth and use the results to prevent a reoccurrence of the issue.[54] At the September 20, 2019 court trial session, the two defendants came forward at last to deny having assaulted her. The first defendant claimed that he and Yamaguchi were friendly after meeting her at a handshake event in 2017 and that they communicated through direct messages on Twitter. Afterwards, he alleged that Yamaguchi had abruptly cut off contact in 2018 because of rumors within NGT48 about her fraternizing with a fan in exchange for expensive gifts.[55] On October 28, 2019, the Niigata District Court held a hearing where the defendants submitted physical evidence of their connection to Yamaguchi and also denied that other NGT48 members were involved in their confrontation.[56] These evidences soon turned out to be two photos taken at a regular photo-shooting event held by the AKB48 Groups.
When these same pictures were published by Sponichi on October 30, 2019, claiming they were photos of Yamaguchi and one of the assailants actively communicating to each other their apartment numbers in "secret signs" together with fingers, in what was termed an "exclusive scoop" of the newspaper,[57] it triggered the reaction on Twitter of Yamaguchi who spoke for the first time about the incident since her graduation. After completely rejecting the declarations in the article as slander on part of the newspaper, she also revealed how these were the evidences presented in court days before, that were leaked to the media. Yamaguchi pointed out how at such events idols would simply perform what poses they are requested to by event-goers, and that while staring at the camera there is no possibility for the idol to know what the other side would be doing in the meantime, remarking how Sponichi should be aware of this in that they are the publishers of AKB Shinbun, the group's main magazine. Additionally, she revealed the existence of still-unreleased voice recordings which contained other current members personally admitting to having had private relationship with the group to which the assailants belonged.[58][59][60][61][62] AKS reportedly denied to the media that their side was responsible for leaking the material to the press,[63] as did the defendant side via a stream broadcast. This was the only one of such evidences to be submitted in court in support of the defendants' assertions, with no new evidences being since presented by either sides as of January.[64]

Yamaguchi was later reported as having given consent for the release of the incident's non-prosecution records by the January court session, at the plaintiff's request. By that time, the plaintiff side, AKS, also previously tried once to request from the police investigators the records on the inspections of the cellphones of the assailants, the statement records, the police assessment reports, and other such documents from the time of the incident which they had no access to, in order to verify the defendants' assertions.[65][66] Both of these attempts proved unsuccessful, with the plaintiff side being unable to retrieve any police or prosecutor material.[67]
After receiving a proposal for an out-of-court settlement by the corthouse on March 3, 2020,[67] the lawsuit eventually ended in a settlement in April 9, 2020, without reaching a verdict from the judge and failing to fulfill the stated goal.[68] In the settlement terms, the two men agreed to pay 2,4 million yen in compensations within a 5-year limit,[69] and were banned from future events related to the AKB48 Groups, although news since as early as January 2019 did already confirm how the entire fan group to which the two arrested men belong had already been banned from attending theater shows, handshake events, and concerts by then.[70] AKS' lawyer, Kazuhiro Endo, still claimed in his words that the NGT48 members were not guilty of being accomplices to the suspects and their reactions towards Yamaguchi had been a result of miscommunication about the incident. Yamaguchi would also not receive any financial compensation from the settlement due to no longer being part of the AKB48 Group and the lawsuit not being filed on her behalf.[71]