J.K. Rowling’s New Book Features a Character Murdered After Being Accused of Transphobia: I Wrote It Before My Own Backlash
Zack Sharf J.K. Rowling recently told Graham Norton that her new novel, “The Ink Black Heart,” is not based on her own experience being slammed as transphobic despite featuring a character who finds herself in a similar social media firestorm (via Rolling Stone).
The new book, published under Rowling’s pseudonym Robert Galbraith, is part of Rowling’s “Cormoran Strike” crime thriller series and includes a character named Edie Ledwell, a “creator of a popular YouTube cartoon who sees internet trolls and her own fandom turn on her after the cartoon was criticized as being racist and ableist, as well as transphobic for a bit about a hermaphrodite worm.” As reported by Rolling Stone, the character in the novel is “doxxed with photos of her home plastered on the internet, subjected to death and rape threats for having an opinion, and is ultimately found stabbed to death in a cemetery.
The book takes a clear aim at ‘Social Justice Warriors’ and suggests that Ledwell was a victim of a masterfully plotted, politically fueled hate campaign against her.” “I should make it really clear after some of the things that have happened the last year that this is not depicting [that],” Rowling said to Norton, asserting that her own fight against claims of transphobia had nothing to do with inspiring the book. “I had written the book before certain things happened to me online.
I said to my husband, ‘I think everyone is going to see this as a response to what happened to me,’ but it genuinely wasn’t.
