J.K. Rowling has opened up about her allegedly abusive marriage and how she feared her ex would destroy her manuscript of the first Harry Potter book to prevent her from leaving him.
The 57-year-old spoke about this in a new audio documentary about her life and career, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, launched by The Free Press.
Rowling opened up about her first marriage to Portuguese TV reporter Jorge Arantes, to whom she was married for a year between 1992 and 1993.
The pair share a child together, but Rowling had planned to leave him twice during their relationship. While she was pregnant with their daughter, she planned to leave him for the final time.
"He's not a stupid person. I think he knew, or suspected, that I was going to bolt again. It was a horrible state of tension to live in," Rowling said on the podcast.
As a result, she explained that she had started secretly photocopying the first Harry Potter manuscript she'd written, sneaking her handwritten pages into work and keeping them in a cupboard.
"He knew what that manuscript meant to me, because at a point, he took the manuscript and hid it, and that was his hostage," Rowling revealed, adding: "When I realized that I was going to go - this was it, I was definitely going - 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.
"And gradually, in a cupboard in the staff room, bit by bit, a photocopied manuscript grew and 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 still meant so much to me, [it] was the only thing I still prioritised saving… beyond my daughter," she continued.
Rowling penned an essay in June 2020 detailing the abuse she suffered from her former partner. Arantes ended up taking part in an interview with the Daily Mail in response, where he admitted to slapping Rowling. He then stated: "I'm not sorry."
Rowling has previously cleared up rumors about where exactly the first Harry Potter book was born, taking to Twitter to explain that she started writing the story in a small apartment above a shop in Clapham Junction, London.
"This is the true birthplace of Harry Potter, if you define 'birthplace' as the spot where I put pen to paper for the first time.* I was renting a room in a flat over what was then a sports shop. The first bricks of Hogwarts were laid in a flat in Clapham Junction," she wrote.
Following the release of her seven novels, Rowling reportedly has a net worth of close to $1 billion.