Metro spouts JKR nonsense, reader comments tell a different story

[SlackJawedDisbeliefXY]

Nicholas Hoult fans say damage is done despite him quitting Harry Potter: 'Still icky' | Metro News

Only putting this here as the comments seem to show a sea change in the Metro's readership.

Starts with an apology

An earlier version of this story wrongly stated that JK Rowling had been ‘engaged in Holocaust denial’. This follows claims in March 2024 when Ms Rowling was accused on X of denying aspects of the Holocaust, an allegation which she strenuously denied. The allegation has been removed and Metro apologises for the error.

When a core part of your article involves quoting CookieBaBaYT, PhioneV2, esotericmagic, Maxinfire and 42andBlue, it might be time to start questioning your choices as a journalist

JFC, they are unhinged. Fancy knowing the date that false allegation was made, is it me or is that weird?

'Which she has strenuously denied' is not the same as 'which is a complete fabrication'. Which of course, it is.

Publishing malicious gossip spouted on X which has absolutely no basis in truth and no evidence to support it, then publishing a mealy-mouthed non-apology which passive aggressively suggests the lie might actually be the truth, is surely libel?

The Holocaust nonsense could still result in them being sued.

Though JKR is usually fine once you apologise.
I notice they are lying about Khelif who we all know is a bloke.

Anyway more free publicity for the series.

The Holocaust nonsense could still result in them being sued.
I do hope so.
Terrible journalism – let's just take this stuff off X, with no context or thinking, and print it!

Rebecca Cook and Danni Scott forgot the age-old advice for journalists: if someone tells you that it's raining and someone else tells you it isn't, you go outside and check for yourself.

The removed section is easy to find.

Were the original words published as a quote from a learned X commentator or were they included as personal opinions additional background material by the activist journalists?

I had a look at the versions saved on archive.ph and they are quite different.

First version. https://archive.ph/G1pk8 (written by Noora Mykkanen and Rebecca Cook Published August 24, 2026 6:22pm Updated August 24, 2026 7:27pm).

Second version. https://archive.ph/jxXQW (written by Rebecca Cook and Danni Scott Published August 24, 2026 6:22pm Updated August 25, 2026 1:17pm)

Latest version. https://archive.ph/iw53a (written by Metro Reporter | Reporter Published August 24, 2026 6:22pm Updated August 25, 2026 4:50pm)

Nobody is credited with writing the piece.

I would think that it had been hallucinated by AI, but the reporting on the Supreme Court ruling (which talks about 'Scottish Law') seems too inaccurate even for that.

Do they pay their staff?

The article claims that JKR has made "comments such as ‘trans girls aren’t real girls’." That seemed an unlikely thing for her to have said, so I followed the link, but it went to an article without a single mention of JKR or her comments. So it is an accusation with no source given.

I missed CassOle's post - how did it go from being credited to specific journalists to being credited to 'Metro Reporter'?

Metro is owned by the Daily Mail, so I think we conclude that motivation is not ideology but clicks.

I do wonder if Rowling's lawyer sent the Metro a stern letter.

Terf Times gives great examination:

https://www.terftimes.com/p/metro-apologises-for-jkr-holocaust-slur/

Well to be fair she has misgendered Khelif. By not missexing him. And that's just evidence 35 697 that gender is absolute bullshit.

We get Kit Harington instead, so all good from where I'm sitting

Only putting this here as the comments seem to show a sea change in the Metro's readership.

I'm not sure it does. I had a quick look at past articles about Rowling and all of [the random selection] that I looked at had more people supporting sex realist comments than ones that agreed with the metro's stance.

I thing we sometimes forget that the Metro isn't really a paper as such - its business model is click bait. And for that riling up its readership is more important than anything else. Providing good information or reflecting the views of their readership gets in the way of generating those clicks.

The real problem with the Metro (and its ilk) is that we as a species seem designed to fall for this shit.

Is he signed up for Potter now?! Whoop that's great, happy with that

Signed up to play Gilderoy Lockhart instead of Nicholas Hoult. Having played the same character in the full cast audiobook, I gather.

When Hoult was announced for the role I admit I was waiting for his, now standard, denouncing of JKR. did not anticipate that he'd completely bottle it. Although it's a little off thread the comment that wraps up this article by Jo Bartosch in Spiked is too good not to share

https://archive.ph/Y0Os2

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/08/25/sorry-nicholas-hoult-youll-never-appease-the-trans-mob/

Nicholas Hoult may have surrendered the role of Gilderoy Lockhart, but he has already demonstrated a fine understanding of the character. In fleeing at the first sign of trouble, he proved he was perfectly cast as the vainglorious coward after all.

😁

Dopey sod is going to get the abuse anyway, he might as well have took the money. He's likely to still be asked about it at every interview. Kit Harrington though, I'm not complaining.

It's absolutely incredible that a journalist would write a straightforwardly defamatory statement in a newspaper article accusing someone of Holocaust denial. Did she not have any journalism training? Didn't anyone else - a sub, an editor, a legal team - check it before it was published? Or doesn't Metro have these things any more?

I know JKR is subject to a lot of defamation and rarely sues, but I hope she does in this case.

The "Holocaust denial" thing is quite a typical anti-JKR tactic of making a claim that sort of has a basis in fact whilst obfuscating the details. She did indeed imply that the Nazis did not burn books on trans healthcare - which I think she was wrong about. (Though apparently the burning was motivated by the fact that the books belonged to an institution run by a Jew, not their actual content.) Burning books on trans healthcare could, I suppose, be considered to be part of the Holocaust on an extremely broad definition. So, I suppose, you could just about argue - on this highly unusual interpretation of what the Holocaust was - that Rowling is denying (a tiny tiny part of) the Holocaust. But when you stick the label "Holocaust denial" on it, and don't bother to explain to people what you actually mean by that, you can make people think she's said all kinds of things that she hasn't said at all.

On the Nicholas Hoult matter, he seemed to get an unusually large amount of pushback from the mob, which seemed to me to be disproportionate to the size of his actual celebrity status. Though he has a lot of roles in the type of nerd-oriented films that probably appeal to the trans crowd so maybe that explains it. Though I can imagine that the trans activists might be particularly sensitive to matters surrounding the character of Lockhart given that he is Rowling's best portrayal of a showy narcissist pretending to be something he isn't.

The Metro isn’t even worthy of wrapping fish and chips in

Burning books on trans healthcare could, I suppose, be considered to be part of the Holocaust on an extremely broad definition.

Only though, as you say, if it can be shown that the books were burned because of their content and not because their owner was Jewish.

It also might be unwise for the trans lobby to prompt a court case that brings 'experimental sex change operations in the first half of the twentieth century' into evidence.

It also might be unwise for the trans lobby to prompt a court case that brings 'experimental sex change operations in the first half of the twentieth century' into evidence.

For instance the history of Erwin Gohrbandt, a surgeon who performed "gender reassignment surgeries" on Dora Richter and Toni Ebel, who worked at the Institute for Sexology under Magnus Hirschfeld, and the Danish artist Lili Elbe. (Lili Elbe, born male as Einar Wegener, died in 1931 as a result of a procedure to implant a uterus and construct a vaginal canal, performed by another surgeon.)

Gohrbandt was a research assistant for surgical questions in the Social Office of the Reich Youth Leader, held various medical posts under the Nazis and is strongly suspected of conducting experiments on prisoners at Dachau.

Fred Sargeant wrote an article about Magnus Hirschfeld. It is worth reading.

'At the Institute for Sexual Research, which was already encouraging castration and male sterilisation in the name of ‘better breeding’, Hirschfeld was able to take his ideas of an intermediate sex to their logical surgical conclusion. It was in this context that in 1930, Lili Elbe – otherwise known as ‘the Danish Girl’ – became the world’s first recipient of what we now call ‘gender-affirming surgery’ at the institute.

Elbe was first castrated by the institute’s affiliated surgeon, Erwin Gohrbandt. He then went on to receive vaginoplasty surgery, including an ovary transplant and finally a uterine transplant. Given the state of transplant surgery at the time, it was little surprise that this all ended disastrously. The following year, Elbe died of infections from these monstrously experimental procedures.'

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/10/01/the-dark-legacy-of-magnus-hirschfeld/

https://archive.ph/bRAIs