JK Rowling podcast – latest: Author dismisses concerns trans backlash will harm her legacy

The Harry Potter author shrugged off concerns about her legacy saying ‘Whatever. I’ll be dead’

‘I never set out to upset anyone’: JK Rowling speaks out over trans controversy in podcast teaser

JK Rowling has dismissed concerns that her views on transgender people will damage her legacy.

The first two episodes of a new podcast featuring JK Rowling have aired where she addresses her traumatic miscarriage, Harry Potter and her controversial remarks on transgender issues.

When asked by interviewer Megan Phelps-Roper about her legacy in the podcast titled The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, the Harry Potter author said she doesn’t think about it.

“I think you could not have misunderstood me more profoundly. I do not walk around my house thinking about my legacy, what a pompous way to live your life thinking about what my legacy will be. Whatever! I’ll be dead, I care about now, the living.”

Phelps-Roper is the granddaughter of Fred Phelps – pastor of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church. After leaving the church in 2012, Phelps-Roper became a prominent critic of its philosophy and practices.

Key points

• Listen to a trailer for the podcast
• What we know about host Megan Phelps-Roper
• Rowling says she ‘never set out to upset anyone'

[21 February 2023 09:30 · Roisin O’Connor]

What we know about host Megan Phelps-Roper

Megan Phelps-Roper is 37 and she lives in rural South Dakota. She is best known for escaping what Louis Theroux called “the most hated family in America” in his 2007 documentary on the extremist Westboro Baptist Church, led by Phelps-Roper’s grandfather Fred Phelps.

The hate group, founded in Topeka, Kansas, picketed the funerals of soldiers and Aids victims. It is known for its hate speech against atheists, Jews, Muslims, transgender people, and numerous Christian denominations. Their theology and practises have been rejected almost universally by Christian churches.

Phelps-Roper distanced herself from the group in 2012, largely thanks to discovering other points of view on Twitter, which she had joined three years earlier to spread the church’s message.

She has written a book about her experience, Unfollow, and she is now a speaker and activist.

For the podcast, Phelps-Roper travelled to Rowling’s Edinburgh castle and, for six days in May and August, conducted intimate interviews with the author.

[21 February 2023 09:15 · Thomas Kingsley]

JK Rowling opens up about traumatic miscarriage before having her daughter: ‘Another massive loss’

In her appearance on the seven-part podcast The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, hosted by political activist Megan Phelps-Roper, Rowling said she became pregnant “accidentally” a year after moving in with her then-boyfriend.

“While pregnant, he proposed to me. And then I lost the baby,” she recalled. “ I miscarried, which was hugely traumatic. It was traumatic physically and traumatic emotionally, and that was another massive loss. I was certainly not in a balanced state of mind.”

Rowling continued: “When I lost the baby, I do remember having a moment, in my grief for the baby, I do remember having a moment where I thought, ‘So we’re not going to get married. That’s clear, right?’ I’m almost speaking to myself, like, ‘That’s clear Jo, we’re not going to marry this guy’.

“But he was putting huge pressure on me to get married. So I went through with it. And then, became pregnant almost immediately after we were married, which is a joyful thing because I cannot imagine a world without my Jessica. So, in with all the bad, there was an amazing, wonderful thing [that] came out with it and that was my daughter.

Read the full story here:

Megan Phelps-Roper JK Rowling (Getty)

[21 February 2023 08:50 · Thomas Kingsley]

JK Rowling says her mother’s death ‘took a wrecking ball to my life’

JK Rowling has opened up about losing her mother in her mid-twenties in a new podcast, The Witch Trials of JK Rowling.

The author of the famous Harry Potter books said the “early Nineties” were a bad period of time for her and “infused with loss” due to her mother dying of illness and a miscarriage over a year later.

Rowling, 57, told podcast host Megan Phelps-Roper: “I was in a real period of flux at the time, my mother was very ill, I had moved from London to Manchester. And then my mother died, actually on the night of 30 December 1990. But I didn’t realise she died until the early hours of New Year’s Eve.

“She was 45. She’d been ill for a very long time, but none of us realised that death was imminent. That kind of took a wrecking ball to my life, really. To me, this decade now is infused with loss.”

Read the full story below: