JK Rowling: Journalists Drove Me From My Home

Mark White, home affairs correspondent

Author JK Rowling has told an inquiry into media ethics that media intrusion forced her to leave the home she bought with the advance for the first Harry Potter novel.
She told the inquiry into press standards she felt like a "sitting duck" after a photograph was published of the house number and street name.
Ms Rowling said that after she became famous she believed if she did not bring her family into the publicity surrounding her and the books then her children would be protected.
However, she said that the privacy of her family was repeatedly compromised by journalists and photographers leading her to take action about 50 times over breaches of privacy and misreporting.
"There were two particularly bad periods when it really was like being under siege or like a hostage," she told the inquiry.
Ms Rowling detailed an occasion when she found a letter from a journalist that had been placed in her eldest daughter's bag while she was at primary school shortly after the first book was published.
She said: "From my recollection he said he asked a mother from my daughter's school to put this letter in my daughter's bag.
"I felt such a sense of invasion.
"I find it very difficult to say how angry it made me that my five-year-old daughter's school was no longer a place of complete security from journalists."
The author also described the moment "it all went wrong".
She described how, while on a family holiday in Mauritius, the man who would later become her husband raised suspicions about a boat offshore that appeared to be watching the beach.
"We were being long-lensed," Ms Rowling said.
"When we arrived at home it was to photographs of the two us, the photographs of my daughter were not published at first, on the beach."
Later pictures that included her eight-year-old daughter in her swimsuit were published in OK! magazine.
In another incident she described how a newspaper published a picture that showed the face of her son.
She told the inquiry she believed children, "no matter who their parents are, they deserve privacy".
"It would have to be extrordinary public interest to allow publication of pictures of children."
Ms Rowling said a Daily Express story that claimed an unpleasant character in the novels was based on her daughter's father caused "real emotional hurt".
"I had to sit down with my eldest daughter, because it was her biological father they were talking about, and well her it wasn't true."
The author confirmed that she did not believe she had been a victim of phone hacking.
"I barely used a mobile phone in the 1990s, which now seems very wise, but it wasn't deliberate," she said.
Ms Rowling described the attitude of elements of the British press as "utterly cavalier" and said some believed that famous people were "asking for it".
However, she stressed that she strongly supported freedom of speech, saying: "I
think there are truly heroic journalists in Britain.
"I suppose my view is that we have at the one end of the spectrum people who literally risk their lives to go and expose the truth about war and famine and revolution.
"Then at the other end we have behaviour that is illegal and I think unjustifiably intrusive, and I wonder sometimes why they are called the same thing."
The witness schedule:
:: Thursday November 24
Sienna Miller, Max Mosley, JK Rowling, Mark Thomson (lawyer), HJK (anonymous witness - had a relationship with well-known person).
:: Monday November 28
Charlotte Church, Anne Diamond, Ian Hurst (former British Army intelligence officer), Jane Winter (Northern Ireland human rights campaigner), Chris Jefferies (landlord of murdered Joanna Yeates).