The writer J.K. Rowling, author of the successful Harry Potter saga, has spoken of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband, and how she threatened to burn the manuscript of the first chapter of the series to prevent her from leaving it.
The British author has made these statements collected by The Guardian in the first episode of The Witch Trials podcast, where she described her relationship with the Portuguese journalist Jorge Arantes as violent and controlling, narrating how she had to hide sheets of her work to photocopy them out of fear that he burned them.
"At that time I checked my bag every time I got home," explains the writer. "He didn't have the key to my own front door because he had to control it. And I think he's not a stupid person. He knew, or suspected, that he was going to try to run away again," she says.
Rowling describes how she lived in "a horrible state of tension" with Arantes because she had to hide her desire to leave him. “And yet the manuscript kept growing. She kept writing. In fact, he knew what that manuscript meant to me because he took the manuscript and hid it, and that was his hostage.”
This situation, together with his determined desire to leave, was what caused him to take a few pages of the manuscript to work every day, "just a few pages so he wouldn't notice something was missing", and photocopy them. "And little by little on a shelf in the staff room, the manuscript grew and grew and grew, because he suspected that if he couldn't take it with me, he would burn it or take it with him."
Rowling had already spoken of the mistreatment suffered at the hands of her first husband. She did it in 2020 to defend herself against accusations of being transphobic. She then explained how she suffered sexist violence while she was married to Jorge Arantes, father of her first daughter, Jessica, who is now 31 years old.
