Reporters 'drove Rowling from home'

Max Mosley arrives at the Royal Courts of Justice in London to give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry
12 April 2012

JK Rowling has described how journalists drove her out of her home and targeted her five-year-old daughter at school.

The Harry Potter author told the Leveson Inquiry into press standards she had been forced to take action against newspapers some 50 times over breaches of privacy and misreporting.

Explaining her vigorous attempts to protect the privacy of her children, she said she and her husband received phone calls from reporters attempting to "blag" personal information.

Rowling, 46, recounted her anger when she found a note that a reporter had slipped inside the bag of her elder daughter when she was in her first year at primary school.

She said: "I unzipped her schoolbag in the evening, and among the usual letters from school and the debris that every child generates, I found an envelope and a letter addressed to me from a journalist. The letter said that he intended to ask a mother at the school to put this in my daughter's bag.

"I can only say that I felt such a sense of invasion. It is very difficult to say how angry I felt that my five-year-old daughter's school was no longer a place of complete security from journalists."

The author, who lives in a remote part of rural Scotland, said reporters "drove her out" of the home she bought in 1997 with the publisher's advance for the first of her seven Harry Potter books. She told the inquiry she felt like a "sitting duck" after a photograph was published of the house number and street name, and it became "untenable" to remain there.

Rowling said newspaper regulatory body the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) was "toothless" and supported former Formula 1 boss Max Mosley's calls for journalists to be forced to contact people before publishing damaging stories about them.

Mr Mosley, 71, told the inquiry that invasion of privacy was "worse than burglary" because the victim of a break-in can replace their lost belongings and repair the damage. He was awarded a record £60,000 in privacy damages at the High Court after taking legal action against the News of the World over a story alleging he had a "sick Nazi orgy".

Meanwhile, Sienna Miller told the inquiry that she felt "terrible" for accusing her family and friends of selling stories to the media after journalists obtained intimate information about her by hacking her phone. The 29-year-old actress said: "I felt like I was living in some sort of video game and people pre-empting every move I made, obviously as a result of accessing my private information."

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