JK Rowling did not tweet between August 7 and August 23, deleted tweets, and then returned to continue harassing Imane Khelif after people speculated she was facing legal consequences for her posts.
Rowling isn’t one to stay silent on X, posting 18 times on August 7 alone. However, between then and August 23, she didn’t post anything. People speculated that this silence had to do with the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif’s cyberbullying lawsuit which was filed on August 11, in which she named several public figures as leading a cyberbullying campaign against her, including Elon Musk and JK Rowling.
In case you missed it, right-wingers, transphobes, and racists across the internet decided the cis Khelif was a trans woman after her Olympic boxing match against Italy’s Angela Carini. Carini forfeited the match after only 46 seconds, saying that Khelif’s punches were just too strong. The far-right internet latched onto this, including Rowling, and began to claim that Khelif was a trans woman. Rowling immediately took to X and began accusing Khelif of being “a male who knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered.”
Even though Khelif was attacked on all sides, she still won the women’s boxing gold medal, becoming the first African, Algerian, and Arab woman to win. Less than a week after her history-making win, she filed a harassment complaint in which she claimed she was the victim of “moral harassment” at a level so large that it has negatively impacted her life. As it is illegal to be trans in Algeria, these claims could have put Khelif in real danger, as well as simply being fundamentally false.
This suit could lead to fines and jail time, as proven by a previous social media harassment lawsuit conducted in France which left 28 people being jailed for 18 months.
You’d think this would scare Rowling into silence, but she’s returned to X to continue harassing Khelif and questioning her cisgender identity. On August 23, she shared an article from the conservative website Reality’s Last Stand, with a quote that claims that a video shared of Khelif in makeup was a “hyper-feminizing PR campaign.”
While we can’t definitively say that Rowling’s silence was due to the lawsuit, we enjoyed X better when she wasn’t posting on it. And if it ends with Rowling finally experiencing the consequences of her actions, that’s even better.
