JK Rowling’s delicious takedown of Emma Watson

JK Rowling has just delivered a brutal public takedown of Emma Watson.

Watson, of course, became famous playing Hermione Granger in the film adaptations of Rowling’s Harry Potter books. But in recent years, Watson and her fellow co-stars Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint have not only posed, as all virtue-signalling celebs seemingly do, as so-called trans allies – they have also publicly turned on Rowling over her gender-critical views.

However, speaking on the Jay Shetty Podcast last week, Watson seemed to be seeking some sort of rapprochement with Rowling. ‘It’s my deepest wish that I hope people who don’t agree with my opinion will love me, and I hope I can keep loving people who I don’t necessarily share the same opinion with’, Watson said.

Understandably, given the Harry Potter stars’ trans-activist posturing, Rowling did not receive Watson’s comments well. Writing on X yesterday, she said that she was not ‘owed eternal agreement from any actor who once played a character I created’ and that ‘Watson and her co-stars have every right to embrace gender-identity ideology’. However, she then turned on them: ‘Emma and Dan [Radcliffe] in particular… think our former professional association gives them a right – nay, obligation – to critique me and my views in public.’

Rowling has every right to be annoyed. Some of the Potter brats’ remarks about her have been snide and mean-spririted. Take Watson’s 2022 BAFTA Film Awards speech, which began with a smug: ‘I’m here for all the witches.’ As the crowd burst into applause, she mouthed ‘bar one’ – a clear dig at Rowling.

Rowling highlighted this moment as a ‘turning point’. She revealed that after that speech, Watson had someone ‘pass on a handwritten note’, which read ‘I’m so sorry for what you’re going through’, instead of texting or calling her like a decent person might. This ‘bar one’ dig came at a time when the vitriol and threats aimed at Rowling were ‘at their peak’. Rowling said that Watson had effectively poured ‘more petrol on the flames’, before assuaging any guilt she might have felt by offering a tepid, one-line note, as if to reassure herself of her ‘fundamental sympathy and kindness’.

Rowling concluded her takedown by holding up a mirror to Watson’s class privilege. ‘Emma has so little experience of real life she’s ignorant of how ignorant she is’, she wrote. She can afford her luxury transgender beliefs, in other words, because she has never come close to experiencing their consequences:

‘Has she had to strip off in a newly mixed-sex changing room at a council-run swimming pool? Is she ever likely to need a state-run rape crisis centre that refuses to guarantee an all-female service? To find herself sharing a prison cell with a male rapist who’s identified into the women’s prison?’

Rowling then delivers the killshot: ‘I wasn’t a multimillionaire at 14. I lived in poverty while writing the book that made Emma famous.’

The Harry Potter author knows the cost of prominent women like Watson ‘trashing’ women’s rights from their seat in the lap of luxury, and it’s the little women – everyday women – who pay the price.

Besides, it’s difficult not to suspect that Watson has only changed tack now because, as Rowling points out, ‘she’s noticed full-throated condemnation of me is no longer quite as fashionable as it used to be’. After years of silence and sideways glances towards Rowling, while doubling down on transgenderism when it was in vogue, it now appears Watson wants to backtrack a little, to reach out to someone she once eagerly hung out to dry. She seems to think that she can have her cake, and maybe eat a little bit, too.

In case Rowling’s missive wasn’t clear enough, that isn’t going to happen.

Georgina Mumford is a spiked intern.