JK Rowling’s abusive ex-husband hid the first Harry Potter manuscript in an attempt to prevent her from leaving it, the best…
seller author has revealed. Jorge Arantes stole the pages of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to hold them “hostage,” she says, leading her to fear that her jealous husband would burn them.
Jorge Arantes stole the pages of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to hold them “hostage,” she says, leading her to fear her jealous husband would burn them.
When the writer found out where the pages were, she took some out of her house every day to secretly photocopy them at work and keep them in a closet.
The author and Portuguese television reporter Arantes were married in 1992 and had a daughter, Jessica, but JK left in 1993 because the marriage was “too violent and very controlling.”
The 57-year-old recalled: “He was looking in my bag every time he came home and he didn’t have the key to my front door.
“I had to act like I wasn’t going to leave him and I don’t think I’m a very good actor… That’s a terrible way to live.
“He knew what that manuscript meant to me because at one point he took the manuscript and hid it.
“That was his hostage.
“When I realized I was definitely going, I would take a few pages of the manuscript with me to work every day…just a few pages so he wouldn’t notice.
“Little by little, in a cupboard in the staff room, little by little, a photocopied manuscript grew and grew because I suspected… that I would burn it. The only thing I prioritized beyond that was my daughter, but at the time, she was still inside me as safe as she could be.”
The night he left, after the birth of Jessica, now 29, he said: “He got very violent and said, ‘You can leave but you’re not going to get Jessica, I’m keeping her, I’ll hide her. ‘
“There was a violent scene that ended with me lying in the street.
“The next day I went back to the house with the police and found Jessica.”
She claims that Arantes, who previously admitted he “slapped her real hard”, broke into her Edinburgh home many years later.
JK, who has been married to Dr. Neil Murray since 2001, also spoke on episodes of The Witch Trials of JK Rowling podcast this week about why she is critical of new approaches to gender identity.
Urging people to abandon “black and white thinking”, he said: “What I have tried to show in the Potter books, and what I feel strongly myself, is that we need to be more mistrustful of ourselves when we are safe”.
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