J.K.Rowling has issued a writ for libel against Paris Match, France's most renowned popular magazine.
At a hastily convened press conference her chief Public Relations officer Andrew McTaggart told reporters: "Eeeh,... averybiddy knows that this partikkular foreign magazeeene mucks a fortune outay slanderin' innocent celebbbbrities. And ye all know by noo that there are none more innocent than Ms. Rowling as we have been telling you over and over and over and over and over... and over again for years. We will be seeing the editor in London's High Court."
Apparently, the article has suggested that many of the themes in the Casual Vacancy are derived directly from Rowling's personal life experience. Rowling has denied this flatly. Said she: "It is preposterous that I would know anything at a personal level about what I have written about. It is absolute balderdash to insinuate that this book has anything to do with me at all. It is a work of fiction... beyond any shadow of a doubt, absolutely, definitely... it is sooooooo a work of fiction. My God! I wrote it all by myself too. Not a single storyline, scene, setting or character was ever, ever suggested to me by anybody else, even my editor... what's his name?... Why isn't her here? I just can't believe this. I relied heavily on my husband for much of the shadier content and I have made this publicly known. "
When it was suggested that she could have drawn on first hand experience for the drug scenes from her previous marriage to Portuguese Jorge Arantes, at the time a known dope addict, she snapped. "I told you the Vacancy has nothing whatever to do with me... absolutely not!", before leaving the conference.
One of her team of eighteen lawyers added in her absence: "The statements printed in this magazine are unverifiable, unsubstantiated, unjust and untrue and even if we have said that before on many, many occasions in many, many different cirumstances we repeat them here because they scare the crap out of anybody who hears them especially when they crop up in injunctions to silence those bastards down at Fleet Street......and we will be pursuing the matter with the utmost rigour ... after a meeting at the Lodge later tonight."
