What a difference a decade makes. If you asked someone from the early aughts to talk about children’s author and Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling, they would sing her praises as one of the most important and beloved public figures of all time.
This is no longer the case after Rowling made her position on the Trans issue very clear, something that saw her popularity plummet in just a few short years. Her comments include tweets that call trans women “men in dresses,” made fun of the term “people who menstruate” and a statement in 2020 about how she’s “worried about the new trans activism.”
However, that hasn’t stopped Rowling from continuing to work and write new books.
Her latest, which came out fairly quietly, either by design or because most people hate her now, is called The Ink Black Heart. It’s written under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith, which she uses to write adult fiction. The book follows protagonist Edie Ledwell, a YouTube creator who sees her popularity plummet after a cartoon is called racist, ableist, and transphobic.
In the book, Ledwell gets doxxed, with pictures of her house being published on the internet and trolls calling for her to be raped and murdered. Ledwell eventually ends up dead and Rowling’s thesis seems to be that Ledwell is a victim of a hate campaign.
Regardless of the similarities, Rowling claims everything in the book is a big ol’ coincidence and doesn’t have anything to do with her real life, something she told Graham Norton on his radio show.
“I should make it really clear after some of the things that have happened the last year that this is not depicting [that]. I had written the book before certain things happened to me online [and] I said to my husband, ‘I think everyone is going to see this as a response to what happened to me,’ but it genuinely wasn’t. The first draft of the book was finished at the point certain things happened.”
Weirdly, no one is buying that story.