just correcting some misinfo here (with the caveat that I’m not attacking you and I’m not defending her, she can fuck herself, I’m advocating being accurate in what we say about her)
The email exchange between Epstein and the unidentified woman who signs as “Jx” is not related to the exchange where Epstein’s connections got tickets to The Cursed Child. The former happened in 2013, three years before the play had even opened in the UK. The latter happened in 2018, a couple of days before the US Broadway opening. So connecting the two to make B proof of A doesn’t make much sense and will make us look very silly if we try to use it in an argument. There are other things suggestive of Rowling which I’ve outlined below.
It’s not Epstein calling Jx “wordsmith”, she calls him that. (Seemingly poking fun at an indecipherable joke he’s trying to make amidst a bunch of typos.)
Jx is being invited to a dinner party but it seems to be set for New York, not the island.
Despite the undeniable fact that Rowling is a massive prick with a history of siding with abusive men in power, it would be exaggeration to summarise the Cursed Child thing as being concrete evidence of Rowling directly giving him a personal invitation. Epstein had a publicist contact reach out to the producer Colin Callender to get the tickets, that’s the exchange that file shows. Rowling isn’t CC’d in the chain anywhere, and as this was handled by the production team they were not technically “her team” working under her. It is definitely possible she still knew about it and signed off on it, we just don’t have any evidence of that at the moment.
The evidence we have that Rowling personally invited him is the non-personalised invitation headed “Sonia Friedman, Colin Callender, and JK Rowling invite you…” but this seems to me also tenuous proof - and it will seem tenuous to people not emotionally invested in bringing down Rowling the way we are. It’s arguably the design of the invitation, which is clearly sent out to everyone who went to the entire PR event. It is fairly common to head with “the producers invite you” in this style, but the invitee may be someone they don’t even know exists. I don’t know if Rowling personally vetted the name of every single person who attended the event; around 2000 people would have attended the play, and the PR dinner was held at Cipriani’s 42nd, which is massive. HOWEVER, given that Epstein’s name is notorious, someone along the chain should have and could have run it by Rowling before giving him tickets, and it is still very possible she knew, we just don’t have proof.
It is also worth noting that Rowling purchased the yacht in 2023, after Epstein died. It does seem very strange that she’s deleted its records though, especially against maritime law and also legal common sense. It would suggest whatever history she’s deleted is worth breaking the law for and worth risking not having important legal documents that could be invaluable to her later, as the log is a legal record.
My personal opinion, given Rowling’s history and the circles she has moved in over the past couple of decades, is that it’s 50/50 on her knowing he was invited to the dinner, but it is very possible that she is Jx. I have to be honest with myself though that at this stage this is based on things that could be coincidences and a “gut feeling” I got when reading Jx’s emails - the writing style reads like her to me. Things I do think point in her direction:
Jx is definitely a woman, IDs herself as such.
She writes coherently enough with generally proper use of grammar and punctuation. I would be more sceptical if Jx’s emails were the typo-strewn and poorly articulated mess typical to some of the other emails I’ve seen in the files.
She is someone who regularly flies a lot. She declines Epstein’s invitation to a dinner party because she’s sick of plane travel and of New York, suggesting 1) that’s where the party is, 2) she lives far enough from New York that she’d have to fly to get there.
There is a time difference between the emails that imply Jx is, I think, a maximum of approx 5 hours ahead of Epstein. Scotland is generally around 5 hours ahead of the US. My maths could be wrong here.
Epstein doesn’t actually specify anything about the 2013 dinner except for naming two other attendees whom presumably he mentions because Jx is familiar with them already. Ehud Barak (former Israeli PM) and Peter Mandelson, Labour Party member. Rowling has been pally with Labour members for decades, most significantly Gordon Brown who has both worked closely with Mandelson and been a rival within Labour.
The biggest thing, of course, yes, the Jx sign-off.
I think her up and deleting a bunch of her travel history a few days after this scandal has broken is honestly the most damning thing. What occurs to me is that she does rent it out. If she rented it out to someone she met through Epstein, she may want to cover their travel history and go some way towards erasing her connection to Epstein. If she is in a mad scramble to cover up things like that, I would expect her to keep doing weird shit like this in the next few weeks. It is also possible she’s involved in some other shady thing and feels suddenly exposed to the possibility of people going back through her movements because of the Epstein thing.
At the moment I would seriously recommend everyone to actually read the files themselves. It’s not at all that I don’t believe she would be friends with Epstein, it’s that I am very conscious that we’re already painted as reactionary and exaggerating. It’s important that we stay aware of what are facts and what is speculation at this stage, as every time we make easily disproved claims we damage our credibility at a time when we really need it.
The exchange between Epstein and Jx inviting her to a dinner party (likely in New York) in 2013
The email chain where Siegal (publicist) obtained Cursed Child tickets in 2018
Related but not unpacked above: an email chain where Epstein gets pissy that someone sent the wrong tickets and he couldn’t get into the dinner anyway. (If this was done on purpose it was almost definitely still a production team decision, not Rowling, so don’t let news outlets spin this into a positive for her as I have already seen one do so. If she wanted to not invite him he wouldn’t have gotten tickets at all.)
A picture of the invitation to judge for yourself
You can also find all the files I did, other details and other versions, by searching “Potter” and “Rowling” in the Epstein library. There are two other files which similarly potentially implicate Rowling but not strongly or definitively. In one someone asks Epstein if he knows her and he ignores the question. In another she is included in a list of influential women and the subject email states something like “some of these you know already”. I haven’t linked these because I would like to encourage searching and viewing yourself, and there isn’t space to unpack them here.
I would currently summarise this situation as: there are excerpts in the Epstein files which could implicate JK Rowling as having had a connection with him, and she has responded to this by deleting the travel history of one of her yachts.
Adding a bunch of trans charities and orgs to this reblog so that terfs will help share them if they want to engage:
Five for five: trans women and transfem focused
Transgender Equality Network Ireland
