This story originally appeared on Out.
Welcome to the family, James Haven!
The activist and former actor, director and producer came out as gay to the thousands of followers on his ex-wife's Instagram. The Real L Word's Romi Imbelli said she still considers him her "life partner." That's despite their 2024 marriage ending in 15 days.
Haven is part of a Hollywood family of Oscar winners. He's the older brother of Angelina Jolie and son of actors Jon Voight and the late Marcheline Bertrand. Imbelli, the former reality star, provided Haven with a platform to announce his orientation in a video on Instagram on Thursday, Aug. 6.
“I, James Haven, begin a new chapter of my life,” said Haven, 53, in a video that started with photos of himself and Imbelli, 44, set to Elton John's 1970 hit, "Your Song."
“After many years of healing from childhood trauma, I am now free to live the life that I believe I was always meant to live. One of hope, one of peace and one of love," he said, apparently referring to his formerly estranged and mostly absent father. “So, as my story unfolds, I want you all to know that I do it with an open heart, with nothing but love for myself and for all of you.” He concluded with an expression of gratitude to those watching: "Thank you for reading my statement and allowing me to be what I was meant to be."
In another video, Haven also read a statement:
“I hope my family and others can choose love over fear, understanding over judgment, and connection over the beliefs that may have kept us apart. I hope they can look beyond the labels and simply see me with the same heart, the same laugh, the same soul they’ve always known.”
Afterward, Imbelli invited Haven to appear in another video posted on her Substack and Instagram to explore his decision in greater detail, starting with a quote from retired physician and author Dr. Gabor Maté of Canada.
"'There is a wisdom in trauma when you realize,' which is the most important thing any one of us can do in our life, 'when you realize the trauma is not of yourself. And the key is to work through that and become yourself," Haven said. "And that's been the story of my life."
As People reported, Haven starred alongside his sister in the 1998 HBO film, Gia, and 2001’s Original Sin. Jolie and the siblings made headlines at the 2000 Academy Awards where she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in Girl, Interrupted, for kissing on the lips on the red carpet.
During her acceptance speech, Jolie said, "I’m so in love with my brother right now. He just held me and said he loved me and I know he’s so happy for me, and thank you for that."
Both Jolie and Haven have repeatedly dismissed questions of incest. Haven also made headlines in 2016 when he helped Jolie following her divorce from Pitt by becoming a "manny" to her children.
Imbelli got emotional in revealing her feelings about ex-husband's revelation, who she calls Jamie. "This is someone who I love who I was very hurt by," she said, describing his coming out as a gift. "I was able to return the gift by saying, 'Can you just live your life? Can you be free? Can I support you? Can I love you? Can I forgive you?' And I do."
Later in the video, Imbelli suggested Haven should write a book about his life, and he replied, "Mine is going to be a Broadway musical!"
Imbelli also posted another video, showing her bobbing along to Todrick Hall's song, "I'm Gay." In the caption, she addressed Haven's coming out and the reaction online. "Today, I'm going to say this loud and clear. My ex-husband coming out as gay may not shock everyone. Some people might say, 'We already knew.' But that's not the point. The point is that for a human being to spend a lifetime not feeling safe enough to say those words out loud to live in fear of what that truth might cost is heartbreaking."
She concluded: "Hearing that truth as his ex-wife gave both of us the freedom to move forward and live authentically. We get to stop carrying the weight of a story that was never fully ours to hold. We simply get to be ourselves."
Haven will be the host of a new podcast from Wonder Peak Media, Safe Haven, featuring weekly conversations with guests about their personal journeys.
11 times J.K. Rowling did something wildly transphobic, ranked
J.K. Rowling attends day four of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse on June 20, 2025 in Ascot, England.
This story originally appeared on Out.
For almost a decade now, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has been spreading transphobia and has become the poster child for the UK’s troubling movement of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). She has gone on transphobic tirades on social media, written a nearly 4,000-word anti-trans manifesto, donated some of her fortune to anti-trans causes, regularly misgenders trans women, and gleefully celebrates every time the transgender community has their rights stripped away.
The author, once revered for creating an inclusive fantasy world where good triumphs over evil, let her LGBTQ+ fans down by consistently doubling down on her transphobic rhetoric. She has painted trans women as predators who are lying about their gender to take away women’s rights and enter women’s spaces under false pretenses. This dangerous vitriol has even caused many of the stars of the Harry Potter franchise to come forward and call her out for her anti-trans takes.
For queer and trans fans of Harry Potter, this abrupt turn was jarring and has undermined their love of a fictional world where marginalized groups are loved and fought for. But Rowling hasn’t just disappointed her fans by spreading her hateful views; she’s also done so in some of the most bizarre ways, leaving many people not just outraged, but scratching their heads.
11. Tone deaf Dolly Parton tribute
Rowling joined the world in mourning Dolly Parton by posting a tribute on X that backfired when the country music legend’s fans came out in droves to point out that Parton loved the LGBTQ+ community and wouldn’t have supported Rowling’s TERF views.
After Parton fans flooded Rowling’s comment section with messages like, “She certainly would have thought of you as a nasty, hateful woman. Nice little tweet though,” Rowling attempted to hit back after a user called her “a fucking monster” by posting, “Well, joke’s on you, because neither of us want Jolene to take our man.”
10. Accidentally wrote “f*ck up some TERFs” on a child’s drawing
Seemingly by mistake, Rowling replied to post on X about a nine-year-old kid’s drawing of Ickabog, a monster from her children’s book, by including text she likely meant to copy and paste elsewhere.
“I love this truly fabulous Ickabog, with its bat ears, mismatched eyes, and terrifying bloodstained teeth! In court, Wolf claimed the Facebook post in which he’d said he wanted to ‘f*** up some TERFs’ was just ‘bravado’. #TheIckabog.”
Internet sleuths figured out that in the post, Rowling was misgendering Tara Wolf, a trans woman accused of assaulting Maria MacLachlan, who was at an anti-trans protest in 2017.
9. Accused Olympic boxer Imane Khelif of being trans
When Algerian boxer Imane Khelif took home gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Rowling joined fellow wealthy bigot Elon Musk in spreading the rumor that the cisgender boxer was secretly a man, leaning hard into the ever-present transphobia and anti-intersex hate in women's sports.
Even after both Rowling and Musk were named in a criminal complaint filed with French authorities over alleged “acts of aggravated cyber harassment,” Rowling refused to let it go and continued to post anti-trans posts accusing Khelif of lying about her gender.
8. Transvestigated another athlete
Less than five months after harassing Olympic boxer Imane Khelif for supposedly being trans, Rowling joined in on another transvestigation of a woman in sports when she accused cisgender Zambian soccer player Barbra Banda of secretly being a man — she is not.
Rowling took exception to the BBC naming Banda the 2024 Women’s Footballer of the Year. “Presumably the BBC decided this was more time efficient than going door to door to spit directly in women's faces," Rowling wrote on X.
7. Smoked a cigar to celebrate being a TERF
After donating £70,000 (roughly $88,200) to the anti-trans group For Women Scotland in 2024 to help them fight against a 2018 Scottish law that legally recognized trans women as women, Rowling celebrated in a ghoulish way when the U.K. Supreme Court decided that trans women aren’t considered women under the nation’s Equality Act.
Rowling responded to the court decision by posting a photo of herself with a drink in one hand and smoking a cigar with the other. While people like right-wing commentator Megyn Kelly commented “God bless you,” the post was also full of people slamming her for her cruelty in the face of people having their rights taken away. Pedro Pascal even called her out for doing “Voldemort villain s---" and referred to Rowling as a "heinous loser."
6. Accidentally turned herself into a meme
Rowling accidentally turned herself into a meme when she changed her profile pic on X to a photo that showed what looked like black mold-covered walls inside her mansion.
While the photo most likely shows wallpaper and not mold, users ran with it and began joking that the black mold had infected her brain as an explanation for her hateful anti-trans views.
5. Whined about being doxxed
On the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance in 2021, comedian Holly Stars, actor Georgia Frost and drag king Richard Energy protested Rowling’s anti-trans views by staging a demonstration and posting a photo holding signs in front of the author’s home near Edinburgh, Scotland.
Rowling took exception to her house numbers being visible in the photo and accused the “actor activists” of “doxxing” her in an eight-tweet rant on X. But is it doxxing if the information is already public? Rowling claimed she received “so many death threats I could paper the house with them,” but both of her residences are historical landmarks, and one even has its own Wikipedia page.
4. Wrote a transphobic character that sounds an awful lot like herself
Under her pen name Robert Galbraith, Rowling wrote The Ink Black Heart, where a character gets harassed and doxxed because of their transphobic and racist views.
Rowling claimed that the character wasn’t based on her own experience, despite Rolling Stone writing that the character is doxxed “with photos of her home plastered on the internet” and subjected “to death and rape threats for having an opinion,” which probably sounds pretty familiar to people who have been following the author’s anti-trans outbursts.
3. Called David Tennant the "gender Taliban"
Rowling called Harry Potter actor David Tennant and people like him the “gender Taliban” in a post on X after he spoke out at the British LGBT Awards, where he called transgender critics “a tiny bunch of little whinging f*ckers who are on the wrong side of history, and they’ll all go away soon” and said they are on the “wrong side of history.”
In response, Rowling leaned into hateful anti-trans rhetoric that conflates being transgender with being an abuser of women. “This man is talking about rape survivors who want female-only care, the nurses currently suing their health trust for making them change in front of a man, girls and women losing sporting opportunities to males and female prisoners incarcerated with convicted sex offenders,” she wrote.
2. Dared police to arrest her
Rowling spoke out against Scotland’s new hate crime act in 2024 by daring police to arrest her for misgendering trans women. The act criminalizes “stirring up hatred” regarding age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics, which can result in a fine or a seven-year prison sentence.
Rowling then went on a lengthy tirade on X — something she is known for at this point — where she accused lawmakers of protecting trans women at the expense of “the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls.” She finished by telling the police to come and arrest her if what she wrote “qualifies as an offense” under the new law. “I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment,” she wrote.
1. Posted an upskirt photo
Rowling, who claims to be a protector of women and rails against trans women being allowed in women’s restrooms, targeted a transgender British podcaster who she disagrees with by posting an upskirt photo of her. Freda Wallace became Rowling’s latest target when she refused to engage with the transphobe online.
Rowling responded by misgendering Wallace and posting a photo of her originally taken by anti-trans activist and fellow transphobe Maya Forstater, from slightly below Wallace to show her upper thigh. Rowling said that Wallace refused to debate her but to prove she has “no hard feelings” she posted the photo of another debate. “I hear he left an indelible impression on the audience. And the chair,” Rowling wrote.