JK Rowling feared that her first husband would have burned the manuscript of her first Harry Potter book if she had left it at home.
The 57-year-old multimillionaire writer was married to 56-year-old Portuguese ex-television journalist Jorge Arantes from 1992 to 1995; the couple have 27-year-old daughter Jessica. The author said she was forced to smuggle notes for her future best-selling novel out of the house page by page so she could photocopy them at work because she was terrified he would destroy her work.
In a chat on the podcast “The Witch Trials of JK Rowling,” she added that Jorge knew what her first manuscript meant to her “because at some point he took the manuscript and hid it.”
JK – whose fortune is now estimated at £850 million thanks to the Harry Potter book and film series – added: “That was his hostage.”
The author tells how she began to get her manuscript out of the house after she decided to leave Jorge: “When I realized that I was definitely leaving, I took a few pages of the manuscript to work with me every day, just a few pages so that he wouldn’t notice that anything was missing, and I made photocopies of them.”
“Little by little, the photocopied manuscript grew in a cupboard in the teachers’ room because I suspected that if I didn’t come out with everything, he would burn it or take it hostage.
“This manuscript meant so much to me and it was what I desperately wanted to save.
“The only other priority for me was my daughter, but she was still inside me at the time, so she’s as safe as she can be in this situation.”
JK has previously spoken about her marriage to Jorge, whom she met in a bar while teaching in his native Portugal, and she published details of their relationship in a 2020 personal essay.
After publication, Jorge admitted that he had slapped the author – but stressed that he had not been consistently abusive.
He told The Sun: “I hit Joanne – but it was not sustained abuse. I am not sorry for hitting her.”
JK went on to say how she left the former TV presenter: “One night he got very angry with me. I freaked out and said, ‘I want to leave.’ He became very violent and said, ‘You can leave, but you can’t have Jessica. I’m keeping her, I’m going to hide her.'”
“So I fought back and paid the price. A violent scene ensued that ended with me lying on the street.”
The author, who has been married to doctor Neil Murray since 2001 and with whom she has 19-year-old son David and 18-year-old daughter Mackenzie, also said she was later forced to leave the house she bought with money earned from her first “Harry Potter” book, published in 1997, because Jorge broke into the house after she became famous.