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Topics: News, Celebrity, LGBTQ, JK Rowling, Harry Potter
Charisa Bossinakis
Topics: News, Celebrity, LGBTQ, JK Rowling, Harry Potter
JK Rowling reveals that she doesn’t care about her anti-trans remarks ruining her legacy.
It’s been almost three years since the billionaire author sent the internet into a frenzy after she wrote a series of tweets that were deemed transphobic.
But the author has now explored the controversy in her podcast, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, and claims that she never meant to hurt anyone.
Rowling told host Megan Phelps-Roper, that she doesn’t care that her remarks have tarnished her reputation and those who believe she does ‘could not have misunderstood me more profoundly’.
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“I do not walk around my house, thinking about my legacy,” she says in the first episode.
“You know, what a pompous way to live your life walking around thinking, ‘What will my legacy be?’
"Whatever, I’ll be dead. I care about now.
"I care about the living.”
While the first episode touches upon Rowling’s transgender comments, Phelps-Roper focuses on the author’s career beginnings and how she fled an abusive relationship when writing the Harry Potter series.
Rowling married Portuguese TV reporter Jorge Arantes in 1992, shortly after her mother passed away.
But, according to the author, the relationship quickly became abusive, with Rowling recalling how Arantes kept the pages of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to keep her from leaving.
She says: “The marriage had turned very violent and very controlling. He was searching my handbag every time I came home and I didn’t have a key to my own front door.”
She adds: “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.”
The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, which has already released the first two episodes, follows Phelps-Roper, who attempts to draw parallels between criticism from far-right Christian groups over the Harry Potter books and backlash from the left surrounding Rowling’s most recent comments.
Phelps-Roper released an essay explaining why she wanted to interview the author.
As the podcast host was born into Westboro Baptist Church, her former beliefs made her the subject of 'disgust and hatred', especially on social media.
However, through the platform, she was lucky enough to ‘encounter strangers who, through 'kindness, friendly mockery, and civil conversation’, made her realise she needed to change.
She added: “Like Rowling, I knew what it was like to be an object of intense hatred.”