"I remember there was a journalist, a TV journalist, who said at the time, very flippantly, 'Ha, ha, it's all publicity, isn't it?" It just felt so out of control at that point, just felt so out of control that the manuscript had suspiciously turned up in a field, that this guy who had supposedly found it just thought, 'Oh, well, the best thing I can do here is phone some newspaper. ... And then of course we hit book six and we think we've seen the most out-there attempt to get a Harry Potter manuscript early, and of course we haven't come close because then we get the guy with the gun. That was pretty serious, that really was not funny. Fiddy told me and I thought it was a joke. I thought she was making a joke.

Just the mere fact that you've produced something that people want to steal, want to put on the Internet, is, for me, very uncomfortable. And when a gun gets involved, the joke's gone out the window. Completely out of the window. I was appalled. The guy who had the gun pulled on him wrote that he'd been in places like Kosovo and it went through his head, "I'm going die for Harry Potter." God forbid.