British author JK Rowling told the Leveson Inquiry today that she has had to take action against newspapers about 50 times over breaches of privacy and misreporting.
The author told the inquiry into British press standards that journalists "drove her out" of the home she bought in 1997 with the advance from the first of her seven Harry Potter books.
She said she felt like a “sitting duck” after a photograph was published of the house number and street name, and it became “untenable” to remain there.
Rowling described her anger when she found a note that a reporter had slipped inside the bag of her elder daughter when she was in her first year at primary school.
She recalled: “I unzipped her schoolbag in the evening, and among the usual letters from school and the debris that every child generates, I found an envelope and a letter addressed to me from a journalist.
“The letter said that he intended to ask a mother at the school to put this in my daughter’s bag.
“I can only say that I felt such a sense of invasion. It is very difficult to say how angry I felt that my five-year-old daughter’s school was no longer a place of complete security from journalists.”
There were occasions when Rowling had to cover her children in blankets to hide them from paparazzi waiting outside her house, the inquiry heard.
The writer said: “There were two particularly bad periods when it really was like being under siege or like a hostage.
“After the birth of each of my subsequent children, for a week it was impossible for me to leave the house without being photographed.”
Ms Rowling, who lives in a remote part of rural Scotland, described one time when two journalists from a Scottish tabloid paper sat outside her home in a car at a time when she was not expecting any press interest in her.
One of her publicists asked the reporters what they were doing, and they replied “It’s a boring day at the office”, the inquiry heard.
The author said: “It is difficult to explain to people who haven’t experienced it what that feels like.
“The twist in the stomach as you wonder what do they want, what do they think they have? It is incredibly threatening to have people watching you.”
Ms Rowling also told the inquiry of her fury when OK! magazine published a picture of her elder daughter, then aged eight, in a swimsuit while on holiday on a beach in Mauritius. But she stressed that she strongly supported freedom of speech, saying: "I think there are truly heroic journalists in Britain.
“I suppose my view is that we have at the one end of the spectrum people who literally risk their lives to go and expose the truth about war and famine and revolution.
“Then at the other end we have behaviour that is illegal and I think unjustifiably intrusive, and I wonder sometimes why they are called the same thing.”
Rowling has previously complained about photographs being taken of her children. Her characters in the Harry Potter series include an unscrupulous tabloid journalist called Rita Skeeter.
Rita, who first appeared in 2000's Harry Potter And The Goblet of Fire and was played by Miranda Richardson in the films of the books, was famous for her Quick-Quotes Quill, a magical pen that automatically translates an interview into tabloidese.
PA