The ex-husband of the author of "Harry Potter" J.K. Rowling commented on the writer's speech, where she told about her unsuccessful first marriage and how her husband did not allow her to leave under the threat of destroying the manuscript of the future bestseller. Rowling's confessions were made in the podcast The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, The Daily Mail reports.

Rowling married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantis in 1992, shortly after she moved to Porto to teach English after the death of her mother. The marriage was the result of a stormy romance that followed a meeting in a bar. The couple lived in the Port with Arantis' mother, and in 1993 they had a daughter. In the same year, 13 months and 1 day after the wedding, Rowling left her husband – after he kicked her out of the house at five in the morning and hit her so hard that she fell.

As the writer told in the podcast, "the marriage was terrible, I was constantly monitored. He rummaged through my purse every time I came home. I didn't have a key to the front door because he had everything under control. He wasn't a fool. He just knew or suspected that I would try to escape." Out of fear that her husband would do something with the book, which she had already started writing by that time, Rowling "took several pages of the manuscript to work every day - just a few pages so that he wouldn't miss it, and made photocopies (...) And gradually, in the closet in the staff room, the photocopied manuscript grew bit by bit, grew and grew. Because I suspected that if I couldn't get out with all my things, he would burn her, or take her away, or use her as a hostage." According to Rowling, only her daughter was more important to her than the manuscript.

Rowling described her departure as follows: "There came a night when he was very angry with me, and I couldn't stand it and said: "I'm leaving." He was furious: "You can leave, but you won't get Jessica, I'll keep her, I'll hide her". Well, I started it all, and I paid for it. There was a scene that ended with me lying on the street. I went to the police and filed a complaint, and the next day I returned with the police and took Jessica away".

According to Rowling, after she became a celebrity, she tried to live as inconspicuously as possible, because she was afraid of Arantish's revenge. When she bought her first house in Edinburgh with the royalties from her first Harry Potter novel, published in 1997, her ex-husband showed up there. "We realized that it was necessary to move", - she recalls. – I tried to reconcile the sudden increased interest of the press with the desire to remain in the shadows for very specific reasons. I lived in a state of constant tension, which I could not tell about".

At the request of the podcast host, 54-year-old Arantish commented on the confessions of his ex-wife. According to him, he not only did not hide the manuscript from Rowling, but also helped her write the book. "I don't know why she says what she says, maybe she's delusional because of the three-year covid quarantine", - Arantish said. "When she wrote the book, I participated in the work, she read it to me, and I read it to her", - he continues. – The first book was fascinating. It was written wonderfully, and I always liked it, because we shared a passion for literature, and especially for literature for children. The project was designed for seven books, I took an active part in writing the first one, and she knows it. She started writing this when we were together".

A representative of Rowling said that the writer refuses to comment on the statements of her ex-husband.

J. K. Rowling