Witch Trials of JK Rowling podcast: Harry Potter author victim of threats, intimidation
Harry Potter author tells podcast she believes trans-activists’ attempts to intimidate and silence her are meant to serve as a warning to other women.
She speaks up because other women can’t.
She can take it, when people say she should be raped, killed, or even: “I want her to choke on my fat, trans d*ck.”
Yes, that’s offensive to read.
But that is JK Rowling’s reality, as she says in the newly released, third episode of The Witch Trials of JK Rowling out today.
“As every woman will know who speaks up on this issue, there has been a huge amount (of abuse),” she says
“(It’s) very sexualised abuse. I don’t think all of them mean it literally, but attempts to degrade, to humiliate. People might say, ‘well, that’s not really a threat’. And you know what? Up to a point, you’re probably right, though it’s very unpleasant to be on the receiving end of it, particularly in the quantities I’ve had.
“Then I have had direct threats of violence, and I have had people coming to my house, when my kids live, and I’ve had my address posted online, I’ve had what the police, anyway, would regard as ‘credible threats’.
“The pushback is often, ‘you are wealthy, you can afford security, you haven’t been silenced’, all true, right, all of that’s true. But I think that misses the point. The attempt to intimidate and silence me is meant to serve as a warning to other women.
“I have seen other women, and other women have told me, and literally had someone say this to me other day, ‘I was told, look, look what happened to JK Rowling. Watch yourself’.”
Rowling’s position is a simple one, likely to find favour with many women: she does not believe that transgender women who have not had surgery to remove their male genitalia belong in female prisons, particularly not if they have been accused of rape and other sexual crimes. She is proud to fund “safe spaces” for biological women fleeing violence at the hands of male partners.
Rowling says aggressive tactics by some trans-activists began in recent years to “trouble” her.
“I was starting to see activists behaving in a very aggressive way outside feminist meetings. There was a feminist meeting in which they were banging, kicking on windows, very threatening,” she says. “They were masked. Which frankly is never a good look. If you’re a good guy, you’re probably not going to be standing there in a black balaclava. I watched that happening and I was deeply disturbed because now this movement that I started being interested in, now this is really happening. Just playing out very fast.”
Out now:
— Megan Phelps-Roper (@meganphelps) February 28, 2023
THE WITCH TRIALS OF J.K. ROWLING
Chapter 3: A New Pyre
**********
How the wonders of the internet also unleashed the darker impulses of human nature.
**********
Listen now:
APPLE: https://t.co/7AXEQ6No0w
SPOTIFY: https://t.co/rE2qDBkOKq
She knew that she would probably be “cancelled” for speaking out, saying she had first noticed the rise of “identity politics” and “cancel culture” in around 2016. At the time, she thought, “it is happening everywhere … There was a kind of puritanism that was rising, that to me seemed very illiberal, so very contrary, I suppose to my values, to my core values.
“I was watching it happening to other artists, I was watching it happening to other sort of properties, creative properties and it was inevitable I was going to be hit with it too. Was it enjoyable? No. Did I take it really personally? No. That’s the honest answer.
“I was deeply concerned by it, because to me, it was a rise of the kind of authoritarianism … If there’s one thing that I stand against more than any other, it is authoritarianism. And that cuts across political persuasions, cuts through atheists all the way through to various different religions.”
While she is clearly no fan of Milo Yiannopoulos, “the alt-right provocateur, I suppose you would call him”, she thought the instinct to “cancel” him from university campuses and TV shows was a “strategic error.”
“I’m watching from across the pond as he tries to speak on various campuses, and there are protests, riots … My feeling was, you are giving this man way more power than he deserves by behaving in this way,” she says.
“It made Milo look sexier and edgier than he deserved to look … Get on that platform and eviscerate his ideas. Get on that platform and expose him for the charlatan that he is. You push back hard, but you’ve given him so much power by refusing to talk.
“You know, I have marched in my life. I’ve certainly been part of mass movements. I’ve signed petitions and I’ve demonstrated it in certain ways. But when it comes to a speaker like that, I just thought they were undermining their own ends. In fact, I thought they were serving his purposes, because he was able to walk away from that saying, ‘look, they don’t dare debate me. This is how dangerous and edgy I am’. And I don’t think we want to cast the alt-right in that light.”
She revealed that she had secretly visited Harry Potter forums, where she had been dismayed by bullying, “the worst and most curious human behaviours”.
“There were definitely individual trolls … purely there, to be objectionable,” she said. “At first I thought it’s kind of amusing that this is how you’re spending your time, but as time went on, I started to really see as bullying.”
