Abusive ex-husband ‘took Harry Potter manuscript hostage’: JK Rowling
JK Rowling describes her first marriage as violent and controlling; her husband threatened to hide, or even burn, the manuscript she was writing.
JK Rowling knows what it means to live in fear.
In a new podcast, she has described her first marriage as violent and controlling. She was young and broke and had a daughter, but no key to her own house.
Her husband was threatening to hide, or even burn, the manuscript she was writing. She couldn’t think what to do, or where to go, and she found the courage to leave only after police were called to her assistance.
Rowling has since given millions of dollars from her vast fortune to charities seeking to support other women who need to flee. By contrast, fear of losing her legacy in a row over her transgender tweets seems very small beer.
Those who believed otherwise, she says, “could not have misunderstood me more.”
“I do not walk around my house thinking about my legacy,” Rowling says in The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, which debuted its two episodes on Wednesday.
“Whatever, I’ll be dead. I care about now. I care about the living.”
The podcast, which is hosted by a reformed member of the Westboro Baptist Church – slogan, “God Hates Fags” – delves into the real panic and danger that Rowling has faced over the course of her life.
Rowling first began to speak about the impact of violence on her life in 2020, when she said: “I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor.
“This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember.
“I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.
“I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty.”
Rowling met her first husband, Jorge Arantes, in Portugal in the 1990s, shortly after her mother died. She spoke no Portuguese but they fell into a wild romance.
The relationship was troubled from the start, with an onlooker calling police to a cafe after he pushed her, during an argument.
They married at a registry office and had a daughter, Jessica.
Rowling was writing the first of what would become her Harry Potter books while pregnant with Jessica, but says: “The marriage turned very violent and very controlling … It was a horrible state of tension to live in because I had to act as though I wasn’t going (to leave) and I don’t think I’m a very good actor.
“That’s a terrible way to live and yet the manuscript kept growing, I had continued to write.
“He knew what that manuscript meant to me because at a point he took the manuscript and hid it. That was his hostage.”
That first manuscript – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, written in an Edinburgh cafe, helped turn her into the most famous and successful writer in the world.
She “left him twice before I left for good”, and was planning to leave him for the last time when Jessica was a baby.
“He’s not a stupid person,” Rowling said. “I think he knew, or suspected, that I was going to bolt again.
“There came a night where he became very angry with me and I cracked and I said ‘I want to leave’.
“He became very violent and he said ‘You can leave but you’re not getting Jessica, I’m keeping her, I will hide her’.
“So I put up a fight and I paid the price. There was a violent scene which terminated with me lying in the street.
“I went to the police and filed a complaint and the next day went back to the house with the police and got Jessica.”
Arantes has admitted the abuse, telling The Sun in 2020 that “she refused to go without Jessica and, despite my saying she could come back for her in the morning, there was a violent struggle.
“I had to drag her out of the house at five in the morning, and I admit I slapped her very hard in the street.
“I slapped her but didn’t abuse her.”
She says: “The reason we left the first place was my ex-husband arrived and broke in. Moving became quite a pressing issue at that point.”
She did not feel safe after finding success with the Harry Potter books, saying: “I was trying to reconcile suddenly having a lot of press interest with really, really wanting to live under the radar for very concrete reasons.
“I was living in a state of real tension … I was so ill-equipped for what happened to me. I had this lurking fear because I know there is someone out there who does not wish me well.”
Rowling agreed to take part in the podcast after being approached by Megan Phelps-Roper, whose own homophobic beliefs were challenged by Twitter. The podcast has been created by a new media company founded by Bari Weiss, called The Free Press.
Weiss quit The New York Times after saying the newspaper was being “edited” by Twitter.
Rowling has been criticised for tweeting: “ ‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
She believes that biological women need safe spaces to flee, after suffering violence.
Some former fans of Harry Potter can be heard complaining in the podcast that Rowling has made the world “unsafe” for transwomen. One critic says she wants to “punch her in the face.”
Criticism of Harry Potter is not new: as far back as 2000, bookstore received bomb threats.
The issue then was witchcraft.
Rowling seems in her tweets to be most concerned about the human rights of biological women, and people in same-sex relationships.
“If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction,” she tweeted, in June 2020. “If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased.”
She cautions against “black and white thinking.”
“It‘s the easiest place to be and in many ways, it’s the safest place to be. If you take an all-or-nothing position on anything, you will definitely find comrades, you will easily find a community – ’I’ve sworn allegiance to this one simple idea’.
“What I tried to show in the Potter books and what I feel very strongly myself, we should mistrust ourselves the most when we are certain. And we should question ourselves most when we receive a rush of adrenaline by doing or saying something.
“Many people mistake that rush of adrenaline for the voice of conscience. In my world view, conscience speaks in a very small and inconvenient voice, and it‘s normally saying to you ’Think again, look more deeply, consider this’.”
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