Abusive ex-husband held my first Harry Potter manuscript hostage, claims JK
JK ROWLING’S abusive first husband kept the first Harry Potter manuscript ‘ hostage’ to stop her leaving him, she has claimed.
The multi-award winning author said she was forced to sneak the precious notes out of the house a few pages at a time and photocopy them at work, so concerned was she that Jorge Arantes would destroy her work.
She spoke out as she divulged shocking details of the lengths she had to go to in order to protect her writing and escape her violent marriage in the 1990s.
Speaking to a new podcast, The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, the author said Arantes ‘knew what that manuscript meant to me because at a point he took the manuscript and hid it. That was his hostage.’
Ms Rowling has previously been vocal about her experience of violent and coercive domestic abuse at the hand of her first husband, who has admitted slapping her.
The writer, now worth a reported £850million, met Mr Arantes in a bar when she was teaching in Portugal. They have a daughter, Jessica, now 29, who was conceived after Ms Rowling experienced a ‘traumatic’ miscarriage.
Ms Rowling first opened up about the violence she suffered in a personal essay published in the summer of 2020, and Mr Arantes said that he was ‘not sorry’.
‘When I realised I was definitely going to go,’ Ms Rowling told the podcast about that period in her life, ‘I would take a few pages of the manuscript into work every day, just a few pages so he wouldn’t realise anything was missing, and I would photocopy it.
‘Gradually in a cupboard in the staff room, bit by bit, a photocopied manuscript grew and grew because I suspected that if I wasn’t able to get out with everything, he would burn it or take it and hold it hostage.
‘That manuscript meant so much to me and it was the thing that I prioritised saving. The only thing I prioritised beyond that was my daughter but at that point she was still inside me so she is as safe as she can be in that situation.’
Describing when she escaped her husband in 1993, Ms Rowling said: ‘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.’
The author also said she was later forced to leave the home she bought in Edinburgh with the money she earned from the first Harry Potter book, published in 1997, because Mr Arantes broke into it after excessive Press coverage.
She said: ‘I was so ill- equipped for what happened to me. It was changing faster than I could deal with and all the time I had this lurking fear because I know there is someone out there who does not wish me well.
‘The reason we left the first place was my ex-husband arrived and broke in. Moving became quite a pressing issue.
‘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 couldn’t express to many people.’
Ms Rowling has been married to Dr Neil Murray since 2001 and the couple have two children. Mr Arantes could not be reached for comment.
But following Ms Rowling’s revelations in 2020, he told The Sun: ‘I slapped Joanne – but there was not sustained abuse. I’m not sorry for slapping her.’
In an earlier conversation about the relationship he said: ‘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… and I admit I slapped her very hard in the street.’
‘He became very angry with me’