That’s not a direct quotation but a summary of the argument in the book One Election Please...How J.K. Rowling Bought British Politics, Hid Her True Self and Hoodwinked the World—an Unauthorised Biographical Exposé by Bruce Masters. I have not read the whole thing (the author offers a free look at the first seven chapters online) but I confess to being astonished at what I found there and in the free excerpts from another Masters book, How Not to Get Sued by J. K. Rowling.
I learned, for example, that Rowling as a teenager carved “Joanne Rowling slept here” into her bedroom window frame. It checks out. Masters makes that a crime of defacement which may make you wonder if her father would have taken her to court for this crime as owner of the house.
And I read for the first time of the Rowling, Inc., lawyers suing a Hindu Festival in Kolkata, India, for creating a replica of Hogwarts Castle. Sound like the recent repressive acts against American street festivals with Harry Potter themes? Of course it does. The story survives an internet search for verification, as well. (Rowling’s lawyers lost the suit.)
How about Rowling owning a $30,000,000 yacht that she bought from Jonny Depp? That’s a stunner. It is sort of true, too. Variety reported in March, 2017:
J.K. Rowling, staggeringly wealthy author of the phenomenally popular “Harry Potter” novels that begat the blockbuster film franchise, has her celebrity-pedigreed yacht “Amphitrite” available for both charter and purchase. The 156-foot-long boat, formerly christened Vajoliroja and previously owned by Johnny Depp, can be chartered at a high-season rate of about $130,000 per week, plus expenses, and is also for sale, per online listings, at not quite $19.2 million. Ownership of multimillion-dollar water craft can be difficult to trace — they’re often owned through inscrutable offshore corporate ventures — but Depp is reported to have sold the boat in the fall of 2015 to an American businessman who quickly flipped it to Rowling sometime in late 2015 or early 2016 for about $27 million, substantially below its current price tag.
A 2019 article reports it has been sold and that Rowling lost close to $10 million on the sale. It didn’t cost $30,000,000 as Masters asserts but it didn’t come cheap, either.
This makes the ‘bad optics’ of Rowling’s support of Jonny Depp even worse (“She bought a boat through an intermediary and then resold it at a loss of eight figures? Doesn’t that qualify as a payout?”) and causes the vindictive lawsuit against the PA to collect $25 thousand in damages to seem down right Dickensian.
But Masters’ books are a total hit job, even if some of the mud he throws sticks. I personally agree, for example, with his condemnation of Rowling’s full-throated admiration of Jessica Mitford, public and unrepentant Communist (why are Nazis the super-hero villains of choice for right and left activists but Communists of the past and our time get a pass when Lenin, Stalin, Mao, even Pol Pot killed many more people, over a greater area of the globe, and for decades?). But the author, as often as not is just off-the-wall in his accusations.
Rowling supported the Remain faction in both the Brexist and Scotland Independence referenda? She tried to buy an election or two.
Harry suffers an abusive childhood at the Dursleys? Rowling is a narcissist who wants to hurt children.
Masters thinks Rowling does not care for the starving people of North Korea or the threat of nuclear weapons, not to mention the Nazi Holocaust, because wizards in her stories do not act to liberate the oppressed, disarm the nukes, or save the enslaved.
Masters wrote the author of a textbook on psychopathology for permission to quote from that book in the argument that Rowling is an out of control psychopath. He believes she has is forming an independent political party in order to become Prime Minister in good time. Hence the “Machiavellian Psychopath” of this post’s title.
You cannot see the references for Masters’ many assertions (he claims there are 385 different ones to back up his claims) but I’m afraid I might be partly responsible for this one; see What is Rowling Doing? Post Twitter, She is Starting a New Political Party.
The only reason I know about Bruce Masters and his books is that he wrote me to say, “I found your article regarding J.K. Rowling being absent from twitter very interesting; thanks for sharing your research and observations,” before urging me to check out his Rowling trilogy.
I thanked him for the recommendation — and urged him to correct the 1766 date he gives for the American Revolution and the assertion that Rowling owns an estate in Tasmania, a mistake I made once, too, but which turns out to be a Women’s Day magazine bit of Fake News.
My recommendation for you? If you want to see the kind of revisionist and contrarian attacks The Presence is subject to, especially when she was tweeting daily for a ‘People’s Vote’ to overturn Brexit, check out Bruce Masters’ books. I think I’d take a break from social media, too, if I were being as wildly cast as a villain as she has been.
Update: Since I have written this post and before I put it up here, Mr Masters has sent me the complete pdf’s of his Rowling trilogy. I confess I have not read them or checked the “nearly four hundred” cited sources for his assertions. Which perhaps is unfair on my part — and certainly lazy! In my defense, I think I can disregard the seriousness of an author asserting that Rowling, the founder and sustainer of Lumos and Volant charities, has a problem with children. I ask anyone who has read these books to correct me if I have missed a great breaking story.
FYI, Masters acknowledged the incorrect date and Tasmanian estate mistakes and wrote that they would be corrected. He believes, though, that he and his books are the reason Rowling has left Twitter. I think he may be right, as noted above, but not in the way that he thinks.
Interesting article.
It is absolutely essential to read ‘One Election Please…’ in its entirety as the later chapters go into great detail about psychopathy in relation to J.K. Rowling.
The book in question (as well as five other of my recent releases) is currently available FREE of charge on Amazon, visit my website brucemasters.com for direct links to all of the books (in full) in the ‘Rowling Trilogy’ – ‘One Election Please…’ ‘How Not to Get Sued by J.K. Rowling’ and, of course, the comedy extravaganza ‘J.K. Rowling in: It’s a Kind of Magic’.
If you read my biography of Joanne fully, you will learn that I use knowledge and techniques gleaned not only from leading psychologists and psychiatrists but also veteran CIA agents who specialise in counterintelligence/spotting liars/detecting manipulation in body language as well as speech and mannerisms. It should also be mentioned that my YouTube channel contains over five hours of selectively compiled J.K. Rowling TV and interview appearances that (by using the aforementioned techniques and knowledge and by using psychiatric tools) I have analysed and dissected within the latter half of my J.K. Rowling biography. I reference multiple timestamps within the videos in question, drawing the reader to extreme irregularities discovered in Rowling’s behaviour, words and mannerisms.
I would ask all potential readers of my varied works to read them in full before passing judgement; however, I appreciate the author of this article having taken the time to mention my books on this site – which, interestingly enough (I just now realise), I have cited within ‘One Election Please’.
Kind regards,
Bruce Masters
The observation that “wizards in her stories do not act to liberate the oppressed, disarm the nukes, or save the enslaved” makes me realize that I do not have a good sense of the contours of the topos or theme of secluding dangerous knowledge and its applications for the good of others, which was something I immediately liked in the first novel – and possible examples of which begin to percolate into my thoughts at once – from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Wakanda to Borges’s “La escritura del Dios” and on and on (e.g., to the Fall of Man in Genesis). Tolkien’s attention to ‘ abnegation’ (as he says in a letter) in The Lord of the Rings is a rich and fascinating example – as, too, in its degree, is Rowling’s treatment of the Flamels in that first novel. (What Bruce Masters makes of it, in detail, I would indeed have to read – but I wonder if there is Potter fan fiction that makes broad use of magic to do things like “liberate the oppressed, disarm the nukes, or save the enslaved”, with varying degrees of openness or circumspection?)
It is indeed bizarre what ideologized mass-murderousness (including what George Grant called ‘sweet liberal killing’) gets a selective pass by whom-all. And the various considerations of such things in relation to ‘magic’ by, for example, Tolkien and Eric Voegelin (who also uses the term ‘pneumopathology’) reward attention.
I wonder if there are any fine (whether precise or expansive) critical accounts of this theme or topos – I’d think there must be, but can’t remember encountering any.
I love everything Potter, but Jo is turning out to be a real disappointment, and it breaks my heart.
About charity John, do only good guys give to charity? The Mafia put money into the collection plate, that must mean they are angels, how about big corporations getting involved with charity giving? Jo maybe gives 3 percent of her wealth to good causes a year, I give many times that, most decent people do.
I’m reading the entire trilogy by Masters and more shocking than the biography is the diary, about his communication with what he calls TEAM ROWLING.
I will update here in a few days with some feedback about all three books, which come to something like 150,000 words, so he must be on to something. At the back of the One Election book, there are hundreds of references, it seems liked a legitimate biography.
Update:
I’ve read the books, all of them, they were free after all.
So, Masters is not a Rowling fan, which is very obvious.
J.K. Rowling in: It’s a Kind of Magic is very much ‘spitting image’, you will get the reference if from the U.K. If you are a Rowling fan, you won’t like the book, the fictional representation of her is not a nice person, the opposite, doing things like flashing headlights at other drivers at night, just to dazzle their eyes, and she is written as a greedy bully as well, paranoid and very careful with money. the most bizarre satire I’ve ever read.
One Election Please… is Masters Rowling biography. It is 90% factual, and 10% theories and guesswork, and the author does say this, he doesn’t say the 10% of theories are certain, but when read as a whole, the book is pretty bad for Jo, Masters has found inconsistencies in her statements from one year to the next, some would think them just that, inconsistencies, others would think them lies or deception. I don’t know if I would have paid for the book as I don’t read biographies normally, but it was on a free promotion, and I did learn a lot about Rowling from the book.
Summed up, One Election Please… is a compilation of everything Rowling has ever said or done wrong. I come away thinking that I really have been hoodwinked, there are so many citations that support the claims made, it is hard not to believe Masters Conclusions.
How Not to Get Sued by JK Rowling. This book is a diary, with a joke section at the start, all jokes are about Rowling, with Masters claiming that he was threatened and bullied by her, and is answering that behaviour by releasing the diary of his encounter with Rowling and her solicitors and by making endless jokes about her also.
The diary is all about him trying to send her a copy of the biography. It contains lots of reproduced emails and his thoughts on the situation. You get to know him a little and it is interesting to see behind the scenes as he tries to avoid getting sued.
The jokes and tips at the start are the best part, and it is hard to say if he was in the right or wrong to hold back sending One Election Please… to her solicitors before she agreed to his 10 points.
If you don’t want your opinion of Rowling to change, avoid these books. Masters was treated pretty badly by Jo’s people it has to be said. He was polite from the start of his dealings with ‘team Rowling’, as he puts it.
One Election is educational, there is a lot about politics in the early chapters that I did not expect, it’s like part biography, part U.K. and EU politics primer.
Masters isn’t a fence sitter, he tells you this in the intro. But he is objective and has a way of explaining things by providing imaginary scenarios, which is very refreshing, not like normal biographies, which is why I don’t normally read them.
There are also 5 hours of video interviews of Rowling on his Youtube channel which are referenced a hundred times maybe in the book. I am no expert, but its obvious that Jo has been caught out by Masters dozens of times, lying on camera. Its shocking stuff.