LEAD: Harry Potter author has "no magical answer" to press intrusion

By Anna Tomforde Nov 24, 2011, 18:04 GMT

London - Harry Potter author Joanne K Rowling said Thursday she had 'no magical answer' to halt the 'horrible and damaging' impact of intense media scrutiny on the private lives of public figures.

'No Harry Potter joke intended. I have no magical answer,' said Rowling at the end of a two-hour testimony to a British judicial inquiry into phone hacking and the ethics and standards of the media.

While she was 'vehemently opposed' to state control of the media, a 'body with teeth' was nonetheless needed to protect individuals against 'horrible' stories and 'misinformation.'

In her testimony, the 46-year-old author, who usually shuns the limelight, described how she felt 'threatened' when her sudden fame at the end of the 1990s exposed her to constant 'surveillance' by the media.

'When you become very well known - and I was shocked how quickly I became so well known in such a short time - no-one gives you a guide book. You have to make it up to an extent yourself,' said Rowling.

'I did not know I was going to receive so much press attention,' she said, describing how she was forced to move house in 1999 to escape media attention, and how she often felt 'trapped' in her home.

In her vivid but composed account, the author recalled how her home in Edinburgh, Scotland, was besieged by reporters bent on taking photographs of her and her three children, whom she occasionally covered in blankets to hide them from the paparazzi.

On one occasion in the early stages of her writing career, a magazine had asked to take a photograph of 'my broken down typewriter and my daughter on my knee.'

When she declined, the session was cancelled.

When her oldest daughter, Jessica, came home from school with a letter from a journalist placed in her satchel, asking for an interview, she felt a sickening 'sense of invasion.'

'I realized that for my 5-five-year-old daughter, the school was not the place of complete security any more.'

Later, when secret photographs were taken of her daughter during a private family holiday in Mauritius, she said: 'Unlike a story in print, for which you can expect an apology, an image can spread around the world like a virus. Images have a life that cannot be recalled.'

Rowling spoke of the 'hurtful' experience of being portrayed as someone who was 'arrogant' and 'throwing money about' as her writing success made her one of the world's richest women.

She described as 'horrible and damaging' a Sunday Times article which wrongly asserted that her husband, the physician Neil Murray, had given up his medical career to be at the 'beck and call of his exceedingly rich wife.'

'This is no personal vendetta,' said Rowling about her testimony. But while there was 'truly heroic journalism' in Britain, there was also 'behaviour that is illegal and unjustifiably intrusive, and I wonder sometimes why they can be called by the same name,' she said.