‘Journalist put a note in my daughter’s bag’ Rowling tells inquiry

As the subject of more than a decade of intense press interest, Rowling spoke of her anger at intrusions and fear that the safety of her family had been compromised by reports of her home address.

In her testimony to the Leveson Inquiry into media ethics yesterday, she insisted on a child’s right to privacy regardless of how famous their parent, and said that spotting a photographer made her feel “a twist in the stomach”.

She said she had always tried to protect her family life from the press by taking measures that included wrapping her children in blankets to hide them from paparazzi and even chasing one photographer while pushing a buggy.

She said: “[Children] have no choice over who their parents are or how their parents behave. A child, no matter who their parents are, deserves privacy. Where children are concerned the issue is fairly black and white.”

She explained that when her daughter was in primary one, she unzipped her school bag one evening and “among the usual letters from school and debris that a child generates, I found a letter addressed to me and the letter was from a journalist.”

She added: “It’s very difficult to say how angry I felt that my five-year-old daughter’s school was no longer a place of complete security from journalists.”

When her daughter was eight she was photographed in her swimsuit on a beach in Mauritius, and the picture published in a Scottish tabloid newspaper. While the Press Complaints Commission found in Rowling’s favour, she said that the damage had already been done.

“Unlike an untruth that is in print, when an image is disseminated it can spread around the world like a virus. I feel that given the fact that an image has a life that cannot be recalled … I’m sure it is still out there, that’s the particular harm of an image.”

The writer said she was besieged by photographers after her son was born. After a week had passed she believed they had left and so decided to leave the house and take her children out. However, she soon realised that a photographer with a long lens was there.

“I rather absurdly gave chase,” she said. “How I thought I was going to outrun a 20-something paparazzo while pushing a buggy. The cumulative effect – it becomes quite draining.”

Over the years the author said she had used either the Press Complaints Commission or her lawyers more than 50 times to tackle inaccurate and defamatory reports.

“I have been the target of unbalanced individuals – I don’t wish to give details,” she said. “I’m not coming over all starry or precious but because on a number of occasions the police have been involved because of incidents, it is reasonable to me to wish that my whereabouts were not so easily accessible.”

Rowling, who lives in Edinburgh, told the inquiry that two journalists from a Scottish tabloid paper had once sat outside her home in a car at a time when she was not expecting any press interest in her. One of her publicists asked the reporters what they were doing, and they replied: “It’s a boring day at the office.”

The author said: “It is difficult to explain to people who haven’t experienced it what that feels like. The twist in the stomach as you wonder what do they want, what do they think they have? It is incredibly threatening to have people watching you.”

Rowling said she and others giving evidence at the inquiry did not want “special treatment”. She explained: “We are not looking for special treatment. We are looking for normal treatment, I don’t regard myself as entitled to ‘more than’. I am simply asking for the ‘same as’.”

Rowling said she was photographed wearing a swimsuit while on holiday in the US in 2006. “I felt an idiot. I felt a fool,” she said. “That was the second time I had put on a swimsuit on a public beach and both those times I was photographed … I forgot myself for a few moments.”

She added: “I am a writer. I don’t think it is of any relevance or any public interest to know what I look like in a swimsuit.”

Unlike many celebrities, Rowling was not the victim of phone hacking, which she put down to not using a mobile phone much. However, while she escaped the attempts of a “blagger”, her husband did fall victim to an attempt to get his address over the phone.

She said that in one instance shortly after she moved house she received a phone call from somebody purporting to be from the Post Office saying they had a package for her and wanted to confirm her address.

“When I was blagged I realised half-way through giving the person details that I was being blagged,” she said. “This man said to me: ‘I am from the Post Office, I’ve got a package for you, what’s your address?’ Then I said: ‘Wait! You’re from the post office, well what does it say on the package?’ And he hung up.”

Her husband, who was her boyfriend at the time, was duped by a journalist who pretended to be from the tax office. “He gave them everything: address, pay grade, National Insurance number. The next day flashes went off in his face – the paparazzi had found him.”

But Rowling stressed that she strongly supported freedom of speech, saying: “I think there are truly heroic journalists in Britain. I suppose my view is that we have at the one end of the spectrum people who literally risk their lives to go and expose the truth about war and famine and revolution.

“Then at the other end we have behaviour that is illegal and I think unjustifiably intrusive, and I wonder sometimes why they are called the same thing.”

Her conclusions were that the Press Complaints Commission was “toothless” and delivered a “wrist slap” and that what was required was “a body with teeth and which could impose sanctions”.

When asked if she had any other suggestions for the Inquiry she said: “I can’t pretend that I have a magic wand. No Harry Potter jokes intended, that slipped out.”