JK ROWLING has talked about the effects of domestic violence she suffered at the hands of her ex-husband Jorge Arantes and revealed she was sexually assaulted in her 20s.
Here’s what we know about Arantes and their relationship.
Jorge Arantes is JK Rowling’s first husband and is the father of her 27-year-old daughter.
The pair met while he was a student aged 23 in Porto, Portugal. They married in 1992 and separated in 1993.
He is a former Portuguese TV reporter but it is not clear what he does now.
After being slapped with a restraining order after hunting Rowling to Edinburgh in 1994, he lost his job as a television journalist and descended into a nightmare of drug addiction.
His 70-year-old mother, Marilia Rodrigues, told the Daily Mirror that he stole family heirlooms and jewelry to feed his drug habit, from which he says he has recovered.
Arantes is last known to be living in a small apartment in the Paris suburb of Clichy with his brother, Justino, a travel agent.
He gave a series of interviews in 2000 in an attempt to get his estranged daughter back, just as Rowling was becoming one of the worlds best loved authors.
He claims he is uninterested in Rowling’s money and just wants to see his daughter.
Rowling met Arantes when she was teaching in Porto, Portugal, in 1990 following the death of her mother when she was 25.
Arantes was a 23-year-old student when they met in a café. They are said to have bonded over a shared love of Jane Austen, according to The Times.
She became pregnant within a few months but suffered a miscarriage.
This tragedy caused their “already volatile, tempestuous relationship” to “explode into violence”, according to a profile published in 2012.
Jorge proposed upon learning that Rowling was pregnant for a second time.
The pair were married on October 16 1992 and ended November 17 1993, when she left him aged 27, two months after their daughter was born.
She previously told The Times: “Obviously, you do not leave a marriage after that very short period of time unless there are serious problems.
“I’m not the kind of person who bales out without there being serious problems.
“My relationship before that lasted seven years. I’m a long-term girl. And I had a baby with this man. But it didn’t work. And it was clear to me that it was time to go, and so I went.
“I never regretted it.”
The pair officially divorced in 1995.
Rowling has called her short marriage with Arantes “violent”, saying it has left her with scars.
The violence came to a head in November 1993 when he “slapped her very hard” after dragging her out of their apartment two months after the birth of their daughter.
Arantes confirmed attacking Rowling in 2000, while demanding access to their daughter who was born after an initial miscarriage.
He described the marriage as “intense and passionate”, saying “We were always either in heaven or in hell.”
Recounting the night in 1993 that he ordered Rowling to leave their shared apartment, he said: “She refused to go without Jessica, and, despite my saying she could come back for her in the morning, there was a violent struggle.
“I had to drag her out of the house at five in the morning, and I admit I slapped her very hard in the street.”
Rowling then fled with their daughter to Edinburgh to work on what would become Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
In 1994 Arantes hunted Rowling and her daughter down in Scotland but was hit with a restraining order and divorce filings.
He claimed to have spent the rest of his trip with another woman.
In her 3,700 word essay, published yesterday, Rowling wrote: “I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor.
“This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember.
“I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too.”
She added: “The scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made.
“My perennial jumpiness is a family joke — and even I know it’s funny — but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.”
Rowling opened up about the emotional damage inflicted in the emotional essay, though she did not identify who had sexually assaulted her.
She spoke out about being the survivor of “a serious sexual assault”, but did not link it directly to Arantes.
Rowling said that an experience of sexual assault in her twenties had convinced her of the need to maintain women-only spaces.
She said that the “assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity.”
Referring to the trans issue, she added: “I have a visceral sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their last seconds on earth, because I too have known moments of blind fear when I realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self-restraint of my attacker.”
The couple has a daughter who was born July 27, 1993. Rowling raised her alone while writing the Philosophers Stone and surviving on state benefits.
The author has described her years as a single mother as the proudest achievement of her life and would write Harry Potter in cafe’s in Edinburgh as walks would calm her baby down.
In 2001 she secretly married Dr Neil Murray with whom she has two children, including Arantes’ daughter.
