J.K. Rowling bluntly trashed Emma Watson as being “ignorant of how ignorant she is” after the Harry Potter actress recently broke her silence on a years-long public rift with the famed author about their opposing trans views.
The “Harry Potter” creator slammed the 35-year-old actress, who played Hermione Granger in the franchise, after Watson suggested last week she wanted to make amends — years after ridiculing Rowling’s anti-transgender remarks.
“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,” Rowling said in a scathing post on X.
“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 blistering remarks come just days after Watson declared on Jay Shetty’s “On Purpose” podcast that she still treasured the renowned British author — despite coming out to attack Rowling over a controversial anti-trans essay she penned back in 2020.
Rowling has long said she would never forgive Watson, as well as co-star Daniel Radcliffe, for their criticism — which the author said led to “death, rape and torture threats” at the time.
“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 said.
“Adults can’t expect to cosy 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,” she continued.
“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.”
