JK Rowling and Jorge Arantes wed in 1992 and share a daughter named Jessica (Picture: Getty)
JK Rowling’s ex-husband Jorge Arantes has denied the author’s claims that he ‘locked away’ the manuscript she’d written for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Arantes, a former TV presenter, married Rowling in 1992 and the following year the pair welcomed a daughter named Jessica.
Addressing their relationship in a podcast published earlier this month, Rowling, 57, accused Arantes of abusing her and even alleged he locked away her unpublished Philosopher’s Stone manuscript in a bid to stop her leaving him.
However, 54-year-old Arantes has now hit back at Rowling’s claims, saying: ‘I was surprised when I read about this. I deny it. It doesn’t make any sense. Why would I do something like that?’
Rowling made headlines earlier this week when the first two instalments of a podcast titled the Witch Trials of JK Rowling were published.
In the first instalment, Rowling said she had to sneak pages of the manuscript out of the home she shared with Arantes one at a time so that he wouldn’t notice.
Rowling, 57, accused Arantes of abusing her and even alleged he locked away her unpublished Philosopher’s Stone manuscript in a bid to stop her leaving him (Picture: Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images)
Arantes, a former TV presenter, married Rowling in 1992 and the following year the pair welcomed a daughter named Jessica (Picture: Getty)
The author said she’d take the pages to work, photocopy them and store them in a cupboard.
Speaking to former Westboro Baptist Church member Megan Phelps-Roper, Rowling said: ‘At this point he’s searching my handbag every time I come home. I haven’t got a key to my own front door because he’s got to control the front door.
‘And I think he’s not a stupid person. I think he knew, or suspected, that I was going to try and bolt again.’
She went on: ‘Yet the manuscript kept growing. I’d continue to write. In fact, he knew what that manuscript meant to me because at one point he took the manuscript and hid it and that was his hostage.’
Arantes has now hit back at Rowling’s claims about the Philosopher’s Stone manuscript (Picture: Credits: Bonhams/BNPS)
Rowling made headlines earlier this week when the first two instalments of a podcast titled the Witch Trials of JK Rowling were published (Picture: Angela Weiss / AFP)
Rowling added that she’d ‘take a few pages of the manuscript into work every day – just a few pages so that he wouldn’t realise anything was missing – and photocopy it’.
‘Gradually in a cupboard in the staff room, bit by bit, a photocopied manuscript grew and grew and grew, because I suspected that, if I wasn’t able to get out with everything, he would burn it or take it or hold it hostage,’ she told Phelps-Roper.
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But speaking to MailOnline in an interview published on Monday, Arantes – who Rowling divorced in 1995 – hit back at her claims, saying: ‘When she was writing the book, I was participating in it, she was reading it out to me, and I was reading it to her.’
He added: ‘The project was for seven books, and I was very involved with the first one and she knows that. She started writing it when we were together.’
Rowling’s reps declined to comment when approached by Metro.co.uk.
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The pair wed in 1992.
