The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon - Season 13

Photo: Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Image

On Friday, Katseye’s label, HYBE x Geffen, announced that Manon Bannerman, one of the group’s six members, is taking a “temporary hiatus” from the group to focus on her health and well-being. A few hours later, Manon issued her own statement, writing, “I’m healthy, I’m okay, and I’m taking care of myself. Thank u for checking in! Sometimes things unfold in ways we don’t fully control, but I’m trusting the bigger picture.” The timeline of her hiatus remains unclear, but Katseye doesn’t have any publicly scheduled performances until their Coachella debut in April.

So far, none of the other five members has spoken out about Manon’s temporary departure, but in the days since the announcement, fans have speculated that it might be connected to something bigger. In a February interview with The Cut, Manon talked about being the only Black member of the international girl group. Reflecting on how she was portrayed as frequently absent from rehearsals in Netflix’s Pop Star Academy, she said, “Being called lazy, especially as a Black girl, is not fair. Now I feel like I always need to put in extra work to prove something, even though I really don’t.”

Meanwhile, fan screenshots posted over the weekend seem to show Manon liking an Instagram post about racism and label mistreatment in global girl groups. (Fans claim she has since unliked the post.) She appears to have followed Normani from Fifth Harmony and Leigh Anne Pinnock from Little Mix, who have spoken out about experiencing racism as the only Black member of a girl group. In 2020, Leigh Anne — who went on hiatus with the rest of Little Mix in 2022 — told Billboard that, as the only Black woman in the group, “my reality is constantly feeling like I have to work 10 times harder and longer to mark my place in the group because my talent alone isn’t enough.”

Meanwhile, in a 2024 “The Cut” cover interview — six years after Fifth Harmony announced their own “indefinite hiatus” — Normani remembered having to perform after receiving death threats and seeing images of her face Photoshopped onto gorillas and lynched Black people in 2016. She added that her management didn’t reach out or offer her protection. “We just continued to do shows, and I was fearing for my life,” she said. “It was pretty much like, ‘The show goes on.’”

Stay in touch.

Get the Cut newsletter delivered daily

Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice

Related