“Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling blasted actress Emma Watson days after she gave an interview discussing the rift between them.
The 60-year-old British author has been at odds with the cast of the popular film franchise ever since 2020, when she was accused of anti-transgender rhetoric for taking issue with a report that discussed “people who menstruate” rather than specifying women. Several of the film stars, including Watson, made statements against her.
During a recent interview, Watson said she “treasure[s]” Rowling and hopes to “keep loving people” with whom she disagrees.
Rowling is not over their former feud, and trashed 35-year-old Watson, who played Hermione Granger in the film franchise.
“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,” the billionaire author wrote in a scathing X post.
“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 post went on.
“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,” Rowling wrote.
“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, 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.”
Rowling said in 2024 that she had no plans to forgive Watson or the other two “Harry Potter” stars who publicly supported transgender rights, which she said was to the detriment of society.
“Celebs who cozied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights and who used their platforms to cheer on the transitioning of minors can save their apologies for traumatized detransitioners and vulnerable women reliant on single sex spaces,” she wrote at the time in response to a fan inquiring about whether she would ever forgive them.
Watson previously made a public statement in the wake of Rowling speaking up against men invading women’s spaces in 2020. The actress said at the time, “Trans people are who they say they are and deserve to live their lives without being constantly questioned or told they aren’t who they say they are.”
