J.K. Rowling dragged Piers Morgan via Twitter on Saturday, mocking the commentator as a “celebrity toady” for his defense of President Donald Trump.
It all started when the Harry Potter author retweeted video of Morgan’s appearance on Friday night’s episode of Real Time With Bill Maher. During the show, Morgan was shut down by Australian comedian Jim Jefferies, who told Morgan to “f— off” for claiming Trump’s controversial immigration order against seven majority-Muslim countries is not a “Muslim ban.”
“Yes, watching Piers Morgan being told to f— off on live TV is *exactly* as satisfying as I’d always imagined,” Rowling wrote on Twitter. That caught the eye of Morgan himself, who quickly engaged in a war of words with the beloved author.
“This is why I’ve never read a single word of Harry Potter,” Morgan fired back. To which Rowling replied, “Because you had a premonition that one day the author would roar with laughter at seeing you called out for your bullsh– on live TV?”
The haymakers continued, with Rowling asking Morgan if he wanted to create fake photos “of refugees carrying explosives to substantiate your position?” (Morgan was fired as editor of the Daily Mirror in 2004 for publishing fabricated photos of British soldiers torturing an Iraqi prisoner.) After Morgan wrote that the “superior, dismissive arrogance of rabid Remain/Clinton supporters like [Rowling] is, of course, precisely why both campaigns lost,” the author shot back: “The fact-free, amoral, bigotry-apologism of celebrity toady Piers Morgan is, of course, why it’s so delicious to see him told to f— off.”
Rowling later retweeted another Twitter user who had found an entire column Morgan had written in 2015 using Harry Potterreferences, a contradiction of his earlier tweet stating he had “never read a single word” of Rowling’s signature work.
In response to that tweet, Morgan wrote, “My eldest son’s a Potter addict. I consider this a serious failure in my parenting skills.”
Check out their back and forth below.
This article originally appeared on EW.com.
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