Stop buying Rowling books, says Potter fan site leader
The leader of the world’s biggest Harry Potter fan site has suggested people stop buying JK Rowling books or watching the films, as the row over her ‘‘antitrans’’ comments intensified.
Melissa Anelli, who runs The Leaky Cauldron site, said she was ‘‘heartbroken’’ at Rowling’s essay explaining her discomfort with the trans movement.
In the piece, Rowling disclosed that she had escaped a violent marriage and disclosed that she had suffered a serious sexual assault in her 20s.
Anelli, writing on social media, shared a post from a Harry Potter podcast which provided a guide to ‘‘cancelling’’ Rowling. It advised: ‘‘Stop giving her money: don’t buy new books, don’t buy official merch, don’t see the play, don’t rent or buy the movies, don’t see the movies in theatres, don’t go to the theme park.’’
The Leaky Cauldron was set up in 2000 and Rowling has described it as ‘‘my favourite fan site’’. Anelli runs a Harry Potter convention and wrote a bestselling book about the character.
Anelli said of the essay: ‘‘My deep grief for what she went through personally is wholly apart from how terrible she’s being to others right now. Suffering doesn’t allow you to harm others. It should make you less likely.
‘‘JKR’s statement is terrible... I am so disappointed. I am heartbroken.’’
In the piece, Rowling said she wanted to protect single-sex spaces from ‘‘predators’’ and said she refused ‘‘to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class’’.
It prompted Emma Watson, who played Hermione in the Harry Potter films and is now a UN Women Good Will Ambassador, to post in support of trans people while making no reference to Rowling’s mention of domestic abuse and sexual assault.
Daniel Radcliffe, Eddie Redmayne and Bonnie Wright, fellow stars of Potter films and their spin-offs, also distanced themselves from her.
The backlash extended to a school in Sussex, which announced it had dropped plans to name a house after Rowling in light of her comments on the trans debate. In a letter to parents and students, Sarah Edwards, the deputy head teacher of The Weald School in Billingshurst, West Sussex, wrote: ‘‘One of our new names may in fact no longer be an appropriate role model.
‘‘JK Rowling has tweeted some messages which are considered to be offensive to the LGBT+ community (specifically, transphobic) and we feel that we do not wish to be associated with these views.’’
Instead, the house will be named in honour of Malorie Blackman, another children’s author.
Rowling had rarely spoken publicly about her brief first marriage, to Jorge Arantes, a Portuguese television journalist, until this week.
‘‘I managed to escape my first marriage with some difficulty,’’ she said, adding that ‘‘the scars left don’t disappear’’. The couple have one daughter, Jessica.
Arantes continues to live in the home they shared in Porto, northern Portugal. It is alleged that Arantes is prevented from talking about their time together as a consequence of an agreement reached with his ex-wife.
Aine Kiely and Jill Marsh, Rowling’s former flatmates, spoke up in her defence. They lived with her during her love affair with Arantes and taught together at a local school. Kiely shared her post on Facebook and praised her friend as ‘‘so brave’’.
In 1999, Arantes was quoted in a British newspaper saying: ‘‘I know people have said that she was a battered wife but it is not true.’’ He said of their ‘‘worst row’’: ‘‘It was about 4am and I told her to leave my house for good. She refused to go without Jessica and I pushed her hard and said, ‘Go away.’ I never used my fists. But I did kick her out on to the street. In a sense that was brutal.’’
He said Rowling returned the following day with the police to claim her daughter. –