Some fake news may have cast a spell on J.K. Rowling.
The Harry Potter author has now apologized for accusing President Trump of ignoring a disabled youngster in a wheelchair during a White House event about health care and Obamacare on July 24.
Rowling, an aggressive critic of the president, apologized to the family, but not to Trump, however.
Last week, Rowling condemned Trump on Twitter for allegedly snubbing the three-year-old boy after a deceptively edited video moved like wildfire across social media that appeared to show Trump ignoring the boy’s outstretched hand. The social justice cohort immediately joined in on the rush to judgment, retweeting Rowling’s messages thousands of times, while including additional denunciations.
Unedited footage embedded below reveals, however, Trump leaning down and warmly greeting the boy, who has spina bifida, when the president entered the room to deliver his remarks.
Trump defender and Rowling foe Piers Morgan blasted the best-selling author for promulgating a lie about the incident and subsequently shared (as did others) a Facebook message from Marjorie Weer, the boy’s mother, who offered a vastly different take on the encounter. She explained that the president in no way was refusing to shake her son Monty’s hand, adding that Monty is not a fan of handshaking generally, and at the time, he was more enamored with a Secret Service patch that he had been gifted during the visit.
Politifact offshoot Punditfact , noting that “[i]n her rush to defend a disabled child, Rowling reacted to only a snippet of video, without taking the entire event into consideration,” rated Rowling’s claim with the designation “pants on fire.”
JK Rowling, in 8 tweets, raged that Trump snubbed a disabled boy. This is Trump greeting that boy. Why won’t she delete & apologise? pic.twitter.com/c61cqRoBzE
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) July 30, 2017
In a four-part statement on Twitter , J.K. Rowling issued an apology to the family via her 11.4 million followers.
“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. 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.”
J.K. Rowling’s PR person told the New York Times that there would be no further comment forthcoming about the controversy beyond the above tweet summary.
As for your suggestion President Trump should have shaken the boy’s hand in the 2nd clip, @ChelseaClinton – Monty’s mum says this: pic.twitter.com/Nrg9Hq48X5
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) July 30, 2017
Watch the unedited footage of the White House health care news conference that several days after the initial tweets prompted the J.K. Rowling apology.
In addition to making the controversial anti-Trump tweets in question “ disappear ,” as the Washington Post put it, given the totality of the circumstances, do you think that J.K. Rowling should apologize directly to the POTUS as well?
[Featured Image by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP Images]
