J.K. Rowling’s brutal takedown of Emma Watson of Harry Potter Fame

J.K. Rowling has broken her silence on Emma Watson, the star of the movie versions of her Harry Potter fantasy novels. And if I was Ms. Watson I would lie low for a few months. In fact I would go full hibernation and spend the rest of winter in some far-flung cottage sans internet. For Rowling’s critique of Watson and her lazy, luxury beliefs is devastating. It is one of the truest and most cutting takedowns of the blissful ignorance of moneyed moral poseurs I have ever read.

Watson is the actress who gained fame and riches from playing Hermione in the Harry Potter films. Of late, she has become a one-woman foghorn of the luxuriant moralism that passes for virtue in celebrity circles. She fell in with the Black Lives Matter contagion, ostentatiously confessing that she had “benefited” from “white supremacy”. (Hilariously, she got flak for putting a white border around the black square she posted on Instagram for BLM’s Blackout Tuesday in June 2020. The color white? On a day for blacks? Demon!).

She thinks Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Of course she does – the invites to cultural soirées dry up quicksmart for those who refuse to partake of the Israel-bashing that has become the moral glue of the chattering classes. And she is a faithful servant of the most lunatic luxury belief of all: that “trans women are women”. Translation: men are women. Hearty supping from the Kool-Aid of gender insanity is a must for anyone wishing to maintain their position in the starry firmament of high-status ideology.

It was this latter wacky belief that brought Ms. Watson and the other overgrown brats of the Harry Potter franchise into conflict with the author of their fame. Because, of course, Rowling is a witch to correct-thinkers for her quaint belief that people with penises are men. Over the years, Watson and her fellow Potter alumni made sly swipes at Rowling and her heretical belief in biological fact. Rowling, being more classy, said nothing. Until now.

Her 600-word X post about Watson is a masterwork of critical demolition. It is cool, restrained and cataclysmic. She dismisses the conciliatory remarks Watson made in an interview last week, when she said she still “treasured” her relationship with Rowling. “Adults can’t expect to cozy up to an activist movement that regularly calls for a friend’s assassination, then assert their right to the former friend’s love”, she said. Oof.

She reveals that in 2022 Watson asked someone to pass her a handwritten note that said: “I’m so sorry for what you’re going through”. This was when “the death, rape and torture threats against me were at their peak”, says Rowling. Watson had “publicly poured more petrol on the flames” of this hatred, Rowling writes – not least in a speech she had recently given – and yet she thought a “one-line expression of concern from her would reassure me of her fundamental sympathy and kindness”.

This is as brutal a calling out of unsisterly behavior as I have seen. In shining a light on the moral chasm between Watson’s public “petrol pouring” and her private utterance of a fleeting, paltry sympathy, Rowling exposes the failures of feminism more broadly in the post-truth era of trans. Many high-status women have giddily sacrificed solidarity with their own sex at the altar of validating the delusional identities of men in dresses. They betrayed womankind so that they might gain access to the rarefied realm of elite opinion – moral treachery masquerading as progressivism.

But it is Rowling’s calm assault on Watson’s class privilege that hits hardest. “Like other people who’ve never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame, Emma has so little experience of real life she’s ignorant of how ignorant she is”, she writes. It’s easy, she says, for the affluent to parrot such luxury lunacy as “trans women are women” because they will never have to face the social consequences of this unhinged dismantling of the truth of sex and the rights of women.

A virtue-hoarder like Ms. Watson can afford to be blasé about the linguistic destruction of the reality of womanhood because “she’ll never need a homeless shelter”, says Rowling. “She’s never going to be placed on a mixed sex public hospital ward.” Watson’s “public bathroom” is “single occupancy and comes with a security man standing guard outside the door”, Rowling writes. It is only – whisper it – women poorer than Ms. Watson who will find themselves on a crammed ward alongside a huge man or in a bathroom that’s seen better days in which a strange man is doing his make-up.

Rowling has nailed it. The purveyors of luxury beliefs rarely have to live with the fallout of their cranky ideologies. Rich celebs bow to Black Lives Matter with nary a thought for the impact that BLM’s psycho cry of “Defund the police” has had on poor black communities in the United States. Britain’s bourgeois leftists luxuriously rail against “Islamophobia” and seem not to care that it was officialdom’s very fear of being called Islamophobic that abandoned so many white working-class girls to the scarce mercy of those “grooming gangs”. And pious celebs can cavalierly say “Trans women are women” because they will never be that poor girl who just wants to go swimming without being flashed at by a man putting on a bikini.

Luxury beliefs benefit the rich but they are lethal for everyone else. Preach, Joanne.

JK Rowling on X:

I’m seeing quite a bit of comment about this, so I want to make a couple of points.

I’m not owed eternal agreement from any actor who once played a character I created. The idea is as ludicrous as me checking with the boss I had when I was twenty-one for what opinions I should hold these days.

Emma Watson and her co-stars have every right to embrace gender identity ideology. Such beliefs are legally protected, and I wouldn’t want to see any of them threatened with loss of work, or violence, or death, because of them.

However, Emma and Dan in particular have both made it clear over the last few years that they think our former professional association gives them a particular right - nay, obligation - to critique me and my views in public. Years after they finished acting in Potter, they continue to assume the role of de facto spokespeople for the world I created.

When you’ve known people since they were ten years old it’s hard to shake a certain protectiveness. Until quite recently, I hadn’t managed to throw off the memory of children who needed to be gently coaxed through their dialogue in a big scary film studio. For the past few years, I’ve repeatedly declined invitations from journalists to comment on Emma specifically, most notably on the Witch Trials of JK Rowling. Ironically, I told the producers that I didn’t want her to be hounded as the result of anything I said.

The television presenter in the attached clip highlights Emma’s ‘all witches’ speech, and in truth, that was a turning point for me, but it had a postscript that hurt far more than the speech itself. Emma asked someone to pass on a handwritten note from her to me, which contained the single sentence ‘I’m so sorry for what you’re going through’ (she has my phone number). This was back when the death, rape and torture threats against me were at their peak, at a time when my personal security measures had had to be tightened considerably and I was constantly worried for my family’s safety. Emma had just publicly poured more petrol on the flames, yet thought a one line expression of concern from her would reassure me of her fundamental sympathy and kindness.

Like other people who’ve never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame, Emma has so little experience of real life she’s ignorant of how ignorant she is. She’ll never need a homeless shelter. She’s never going to be placed on a mixed sex public hospital ward. I’d be astounded if she’s been in a high street changing room since childhood. Her ‘public bathroom’ is single occupancy and comes with a security man standing guard outside the door. Has she had to strip off in a newly mixed-sex changing room at a council-run swimming pool? Is she ever likely to need a state-run rape crisis centre that refuses to guarantee an all-female service? To find herself sharing a prison cell with a male rapist who’s identified into the women’s prison?

I wasn’t a multimillionaire at fourteen. I lived in poverty while writing the book that made Emma famous. I therefore understand from my own life experience what the trashing of women’s rights in which Emma has so enthusiastically participated means to women and girls without her privileges.

The greatest irony here is that, had Emma not decided in her most recent interview to declare that she loves and treasures me - a change of tack I suspect she’s adopted because she’s noticed full-throated condemnation of me is no longer quite as fashionable as it was - I might never have been this honest.

Adults can’t expect to cosy up to an activist movement that regularly calls for a friend’s assassination, then assert their right to the former friend’s love, as though the friend was in fact their mother. Emma is rightly free to disagree with me and indeed to discuss her feelings about me in public - but I have the same right, and I’ve finally decided to exercise it.

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