In response to J.K. Rowling’s recent essay where she called her first marriage “violent”, her first husband Jorge Arantes admitted to slapping her but denied “sustained abuse.” They had first met in a bar in Porto one evening in 1992 while she taught English and was writing Harry Potter.

According to The Sun, 52-year-old ex-drug addict and father to Rowling’s daughter Jessica, Arantes said, “I slapped Joanne — but there was not sustained abuse. I’m not sorry for slapping her. If she says that, that’s up to her. It’s not true I hit her.”

After being quizzed about his own admission ten years ago that he had hit her on the night she left him, the former TV journalist added, “Yes. It is true I slapped her. But I didn’t abuse her.”

The 54-year-old Harry Potter writer J.K. Rowling revealed on Wednesday she had suffered domestic abuse in her first marriage and had been sexually assaulted — though she did not identify the attacker.

Her revelation of her past comes after her controversial tweets about transgender people, where she said only women could menstruate.

Responding to the criticism, she took to social media in a lengthy post,

“I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember. I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.”

Rowling is now happily married to Neil Murray, a doctor for 19 years. 

She continued, “I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty. But I’m now married to a truly good and principled man, safe and secure in ways I never in a million years expected to be. However, the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made.”