Friday, November 25, 2011

'Harry Potter’ author J.K. Rowling testifies on media abuses in Britain

British writer JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series of books, poses during the launch of new online website Pottermore in London June 23, 2011. The seven Harry Potter novels will be available in ebook form in October, author J.K. Rowling said on Thursday at the launch of a new interactive online website Pottermore (www.pottermore.com) that will allow readers to navigate through the boy wizard stories. Rowling gave her clearest indication yet that she would not write an eighth Harry Potter story to follow the final instalment published in 2007 by Bloomsbury in Britain and Scholastic in the United States. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett (BRITAIN - Tags: MEDIA SOCIETY ENTERTAINMENT)
Britain’s Lord Justice Leveson is currently leading an inquiry into the British media’s abusive pursuit of celebrities, searching for sensational stories as part of the fall-out of Rupert Murdoch’s phone-hacking scandal involving several celebrities. The last celebrity to testify was Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who told the Leveson Inquiry that she felt threatened and was even blackmailed by journalists into giving up information.

"It feels threatening to have people watching you. The cumulative effect … becomes quite draining,” she said, according to The Los Angeles Times.

Rowling also went into detail about how the paparazzi camped outside her house to get pictures, one journalist who claimed he was someone else to get news and another who even put a note in her daughter’s backpack. “I felt completely trapped in the house, and of course that had a massive effect on the children,” she said.

The Telegraph reports that Rowling has taken legal action over 50 times in just 14 years to keep her daughters out of the public eye, because, “children do best when they are kept out of the public eye.”

During her testimony, she also talked about how the press framed one of her daughters as a “bully,” claiming that she, “distressed fellow pupils by revealing that Harry Potter dies in the final Harry Potter book,” when Rowling was working on the final novel in 2007.

Other celebrities, including actors Hugh Grant and Sienna Miller have also testified before the inquiry. Earlier in the week, Miller said the News of the World, “made her life hell” and that the paper’s phone-hacking had caused her to experience “complete anxiety” and “paranoia,” according to
the Telegraph.

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