The renowned author was speaking in the first episode of the podcast series “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling,” released this week as part of a project exploring Rowling’s controversial modern legacy.
While the broad strokes of Rowling’s experience were known — she revealed in a public letter in 2020 that she is a survivor of “domestic abuse and sexual assault” — the new details shared in the podcast interview show how books beloved by millions almost didn’t come to be.
Rowling married Jorge Arantes in Portugal in 1992 and the pair separated in 1993. Arantes admitted in a 2020 interview with British tabloid the Sun that he “slapped” Rowling during their marriage. He claimed “there was not sustained abuse.” While Rowling did not name Arantes in the podcast, she previously said her first marriage with her daughter’s father was violent.
In the podcast, Rowling said she tried to leave her former husband, succeeded several times, then went back several times — a pattern experts say is common among people in abusive relationships.
She described a sense of isolation and lack of control during their marriage. “At this point, he’s searching my handbag every time I come home. I haven’t got a key to my own front door because he’s got to control the front door. I think he knew, or suspected, that I was going to try and bolt again,” she said.
She describes this period in her life as “horrible,” because she had to act as though she was not planning to leave the marriage so as not to arouse suspicion. And yet, she continued to write, building on an idea for Harry Potter that she first had while on a train from Manchester to London in 1990, at the age of 25.
“He knew what that manuscript meant to me because at a point he took the manuscript and hid it and that was his hostage,” she said of her ex-husband.
Rowling says she decided to leave her marriage for good after the birth of her daughter, Jessica, in 1993. “I do remember thinking very clearly … she’s not going to grow up and watch this happening to her mother, she’s not going to grow up and think that this is normal or okay.”
Rowling began to make plans to go to her sister’s home in Scotland. But her Harry Potter manuscript “still meant so much to me,” so she also made a plan to preserve it, suspecting that “if I wasn’t able to get out with everything, he would burn it or take it or hold it hostage.”
“I would take a few pages of the manuscript into work every day — just a few pages so he wouldn’t realize anything was missing — and I would photocopy it. And gradually in a cupboard in the staff room, bit by bit, a photocopied manuscript grew and grew and grew,” she recalled.
After a violent night, in which Rowling says her ex-husband physically abused her, she notified the police and left him, moving with her daughter to Scotland in 1993. The first Harry Potter book was published in 1997.
More than 500 million copies of the Harry Potter books have been sold worldwide since. The series holds the Guinness World Record title for best-selling children’s book series. This success has turned Rowling into a household name and one of the most successful authors of all time. While the last of the seven-part series came out in 2007, children and adults today continue to immerse themselves in the wizarding world of Hogwarts. Related products, from films to spinoff books, plays and video games, continue to be released.
While the author continues to dominate headlines, in recent years it’s been more so for her public statements about trans issues than for her writing. Rowling has argued in favor of spaces exclusively for women who are born as women, and criticized the idea that there is “no material difference” between those women and trans women — a position some have labeled exclusionary and discriminatory.
Rowling’s critics include some of the actors who have portrayed her characters over the years. Daniel Radcliffe, who played the hero Harry Potter in the franchise, said in 2020 that any statement implying that transgender women are not women “erases the identity and dignity of transgender people.”
Other cast members have publicly defended Rowling, including Ralph Fiennes, who played the evil Lord Voldemort. He told the New York Times last year that “the verbal abuse directed at her is disgusting, it’s appalling.”
“The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling,” whose first two episodes were released Tuesday, dives into the backlash to Rowling’s views. In the first episode, Rowling says she “never set out to upset anyone.”
“However, I was not uncomfortable with getting off my pedestal,” she continued. She responded to those on social media who told her she was ruining the legacy she built with her novels, saying they “could not have misunderstood me more profoundly.”
“I do not walk around my house thinking about my legacy,” she continued. “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.”
