Taiwanese actor Darren Wang has pleaded not guilty at the appeal trial of his personal data case, maintaining his innocence after he and his girlfriend were sentenced to six months in prison earlier this year.
According to MHN, citing Taiwan’s SET News, Wang and his girlfriend appeared at the first appellate hearing on September 30 and denied the charges against them. Mothership reported that the hearing took place at Taiwan’s High Court, where Wang and his girlfriend, Chueh Mu-hsuan, said they were not guilty.
In April, the New Taipei District Court sentenced both Wang and his girlfriend to six months in prison each for violating the Personal Information Protection Act, a ruling the couple is now appealing. The court found them guilty of the illegal use of personal data but acquitted them of illegal collection of personal information, with the sentences commutable to fines, the Global Times reported.
Prosecutors allege two separate matters in which Wang approached an intermediary, Yu Hsiang-min, for help retrieving personal data. The first involved a man surnamed Pan, from whom Wang’s girlfriend was trying to recover NT$4 million in investment-related debt. The second involved Chen Chih-ming, the alleged head of a draft-evasion ring, whom Wang was unhappy with after paying for a service he says was never delivered, Mothership reported. MHN reported that Wang allegedly paid a broker NT$3.6 million (about 158 million KRW) in 2024 for a falsified medical certificate to evade military service, and later asked a friend to connect him with a Taipei City police detective to look up the broker’s personal information after losing contact.
In court, Wang said he had only asked someone to help locate a man known by the nickname “Xiao Hei,” without providing a real name, and called off the search when he learned Chen was in prison. On the debt matter, he said he merely set up a group chat between Yu and his girlfriend and left them to it, unaware of the data lookups that followed.
The data case is an offshoot of Wang’s much larger draft-evasion scandal. In a separate case, Wang pleaded guilty in November 2025 to causing a public official to record false information, document forgery, and obstructing the conscription system — bowing in apology in court and asking for leniency, with his lawyer noting he had already served nine months of military service. Wang, born in 1991, rose to fame across Asia with the 2015 film “Our Times.”
With both sides having now stated their positions at the appeal’s first hearing, attention turns to how the High Court will rule on the couple’s not-guilty claims.
