We’re well aware that “Harry Potter” creator J.K. Rowling is no fan of Donald Trump, and that’s her right: plenty of Republicans who call him their president aren’t too thrilled either. But now we have some idea of what it takes to get her to correct the record when she’s taken in by fake news … and it’s a lot.
Rowling finally issued an apology Monday afternoon for the tweets she posted Friday, laying into Trump for refusing to shake the hand of a young boy in a wheelchair. Unedited video showed the claim to be totally bogus, but that didn’t stop others from retweeting her claim more than 10,000 times and awarding it more than 50,000 “likes.”
PunditFact, a spin-off of PolitiFact, on Monday afternoon rated Rowling’s claim “Pants on Fire,” and CNN’s Oliver Darcy reported just before 5 p.m. that he had reached out to Rowling for comment.
Spox for @jk_rowling just emailed me on this: "We don’t have a comment at this present time"
(Rowling's tweets still remain up on her acct) https://t.co/67nyJ7dx8Q
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) July 31, 2017
Not clear at all why @jk_rowling hasn't taken down her tweets. They've amassed tens-of-thousands of retweets and misled many.
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) July 31, 2017
No comment “at this present time”? Even the boy’s mother reportedly took to Facebook to get the message to Rowling that her tweets were fiction and her son, not a big shaker of hands, was trying to show the president the Secret Service patch he received as a souvenir of his White House visit.
Re: my tweets about the small boy in a wheelchair whose proferred hand the president appeared to ignore in press footage, multiple /1
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) July 31, 2017
sources have informed me that that was not a full or accurate representation of their interaction. I very clearly projected my own /2
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) July 31, 2017
sensitivities around the issue of disabled people being overlooked or ignored onto the images I saw and if that caused any distress /3
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) July 31, 2017
to that boy or his family, I apologise unreservedly. These tweets will remain, but I will delete the previous ones on the subject. /4x
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) July 31, 2017
Considering it took the equivalent of several crowbars to pry out of her, that’s actually a nice statement. Now if all of the other celebrities and blue-checkmarks who retweeted her original claim would follow suit, that’d be a start.
https://twitter.com/drewsexton23/status/892132443079102464
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Related:
J.K. Rowling STILL hasn’t corrected her tweets while Don Cheadle and other verified users spread her lie https://t.co/18pnlSkY1G
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) July 31, 2017
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