Rowling Sorry for Inaccurate Trump Tweets

Author apologizes to parents of boy she tweeted about
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 1, 2017 1:25 PM CDT
Rowling Apologizes for Trump Tweets, Though Not to Trump Himself
This is a Sept. 27, 2012, file photo of British author JK Rowling as she poses for photographers during an unveiling of her new book.   (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis, File)

JK Rowling started an uproar when she claimed, via Twitter, that President Trump had refused to shake the hand of a young boy in a wheelchair. That claim turned out not to be true, leading Rowling to delete her original tweets and apologize, Time and the Telegraph report. Rowling's original tweets (archived here) were based on an edited video of a July 24 press conference in which the young boy appeared to reach out to shake hands and Trump appeared to ignore him. But the full video—as many critics, including Piers Morgan, PolitiFact, and the boy's own mother, pointed out to Rowling—clearly shows Trump leaning down to talk to the boy and paying him quite a bit of attention.

"Re: my tweets about the small boy in a wheelchair whose proferred hand the president appeared to ignore in press footage, multiple sources have informed me that that was not a full or accurate representation of their interaction," Rowling said in a series of tweets Monday. "I very clearly projected my own sensitivities around the issue of disabled people being overlooked or ignored onto the images I saw and if that caused any distress to that boy or his family, I apologise unreservedly. These tweets will remain, but I will delete the previous ones on the subject." Rowling did not address her apology to Trump himself, whom she's called worse than Voldemort. (More JK Rowling stories.)

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