Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling responded to out actor Stephen Fry’s recent condemnation of her anti-trans crusade over the weekend by suggesting that, contrary to Fry’s own comments, the two are not (and may never have been) particularly friendly.

Fry, who has narrated the audiobook versions of all seven of the anti-trans activist’s Harry Potter novels, made headlines last week for comments he reportedly made about Rowling during a live recording of Queer Theatre Limited’s podcast The Show People.

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“She has been radicalised, I fear,” renowned gay actor Stephen Fry said of the children’s author.

According to the Daily Mail, Fry said that he feared Rowling “has been radicalized” by both the views of so-called Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) and the backlash to her own anti-trans rhetoric.

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“I disagree profoundly with her on this subject. I am angry she does not disavow some of the more revolting and truly horrible, destructive violently destructive things that people say. She does not attack those at all,” Fry reportedly said. “She says things that are inflammatory and contemptuous, mocking and add to a terribly distressing time for trans people.”

Since first publishing a 2020 essay arguing that allowing trans women to access women-only spaces somehow endangers cisgender women and girls, Rowling has become perhaps the most famous anti-trans advocate in the world.

She has dedicated large sums of her reported $1.2 billion fortune to rolling back and limiting trans rights in the U.K. Last year, she pledged a £70,000 (about $89,000) donation to For Women Scotland (FWS), the anti-trans organization behind the legal challenge that resulted in the U.K. Supreme Court’s April ruling that the legal definition of a woman under the country’s 2010 Equality Act is based on “biological sex.” And last December, she launched her private JK Rowling Women’s Fund to personally bankroll legal cases aimed at diminishing rights and protections for transgender women in the U.K. and Ireland.

During his conversation with The Show People host Andrew Keates, Fry reportedly added that he was “sorry” to see Rowling’s transphobic turn in recent years, “because I always liked her company. I found her charming, funny and interesting and then this thing happened and it completely altered the way she talks and engages with the world now.”

On Saturday, Good Law Project director and frequent Rowling critic Jo Maugham shared part of Fry’s quote on X, praising the actor for speaking out and adding that he has spoken to other former friends of the author “who now despair of her privately but won’t do so publicly.”

Rowling shared a screenshot of Maugham’s post, commenting that “It is a great mistake to assume that everyone who claims to have been a friend of mine was ever considered a friend by me.”

As the Daily Mail noted, Fry has previously drawn criticism for his reluctance to comment on Rowling’s transphobia. During a 2022 interview, he reportedly said that while “it is right to remind people that trans people are here and that they are hurting and that they are being abominably treated … to scream ‘transphobe’ at anybody who does not buy into every single aspect of that particular person’s trans views is so self-harming. It does not get the thing done.”

In the same interview, he noted that Rowling “is a friend of mine and I have trans friends and intersex friends who are deeply upset by her. That is a circle I have to square personally.”

Following the Daily Mail’s report on Fry’s comments at the Show People recording, host Keates addressed the coverage in an Instagram post.

“It’s been painful, after all these years of knowing him, to see so many label him a ‘transphobe’, despite him never having expressed anything remotely transphobia and despite interviews filled with pro-trans support being twisted out of context,” Keates wrote. “It mattered to me to bring him into an unapologetically LGBTQ+ space, @the2brewers as one of us, where he could speak freely, including about JK Rowling’s hateful, transphobic views. And I’m proud that he did and we made space for him to do so. He condemned her harmful rhetoric with vulnerability and passion.”

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