JK Rowling opened up about the rocky relationship with her first husband

JK Rowling’s first husband, George Arantes, once ‘stole’ the manuscript of a Harry Potter novel in order to prevent her from divorcing her. In the first episode of JK Rowling’s Witch Trials podcast, the writer recalled the difficult relationship with Arantes and, in particular, the episodes of their life together, which ultimately led to the couple going their separate ways. “The situation was bad, but until you really get over it, you don’t know what to do,” Rowling, 57, said of her first marriage, which lasted from 1992 to 1995. “I left him twice before leaving for good, and came back twice.” JK Rowling and George Arantes with their daughter Jessica.Photo credit: Shutterstock/REX.She added that her relationship with Arantes at one point “became very aggressive and with a strong element of control”. The writer’s husband at the time searched her bag every time she came home. “I didn’t have a front door key because he was controlling the front door,” Joan admitted. “He’s not a stupid person, I think he knew or suspected that I would try to escape again.”Rowling noted that the tension during this period of her life forced her to play the role of an exemplary wife, but according to the writer, she was never a good actress and did not know how to do good figure with a bad game. In addition, during this time she continued to work on the first novel about the boy wizard, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. “He actually knew what the manuscript meant to me, because at some point he took it and hid it. And it was his hostage.”This happened at a time when Rowling was trying to “work through several pages of the manuscript at once a day, so he didn’t understand what was missing there, and I made copies”. Eventually, Joan made the decision to leave Arantes forever. “Little by little, in the closet of the dressing room, step by step, the copy of my manuscript grew and grew, because I suspected that I could not take all the things – he burned it or continued to hold on,” she recalls. But not only on the manuscript were concerns. “…there was also my daughter (Jessica Rowling Arantes, now she’s 29). But she was inside of me, so she was as safe as possible in this situation,” Joan added. D. Rowling’s book “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”.Photo credit: Alex Wong/Newsmakers.Let me remind you that the first novel “Harry Potter and the Magic Stone” was published in 1997. Its success and its aftermath catapulted Rowling into the world elite of writers. In 2001, Rowling married a second time to Neil Murray, a doctor, and had two children with him. In 2020, George Arantes admitted in an interview with reporters that the marriage with Joan broke up through his fault.