Melissa Anelli - The Leaky Cauldron

The Leaky Cauldron

In 2001, Anelli joined the all-volunteer staff of The Leaky Cauldron, a relatively new web site devoted to the Harry Potter universe. On her own initiative, Anelli began contacting individuals at Warner Brothers, which was producing the Harry Potter films, and at Scholastic, which published the Harry Potter books in the United States. It took a year before the movie studio took her seriously and began answering her questions with reportable information, and a longer period of time before the publishers agreed to do the same. By the end of 2002, The Leaky Cauldron was receiving over 500,000 hits per day. By November 2008, largely under Anelli's influence, the site became the second most popular English-language Harry Potter fansite, with over 1 million hits per day.

In 2002, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling announced that she would release a single index card containing 93 words that were clues to the content of the unreleased fifth novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The index card would be auctioned, with all proceeds benefitting Book Aid International. Anelli organized a campaign to have fans combine their money to purchase the card. She incorporated a nonprofit organization, Leaky, Inc., and became its first president. The card sold to an anonymous collector for $45,231, over six times the reserve price. Leaky, Inc. donated the $23,656 they had collected to Book Aid International. In 2005, Anelli established a for-profit entity, Leaky Net, LLC, to serve as the legal entity representing her TLC website business. It is a private limited liability company registered in the state of New York, where she currently resides (as of 2009).

Rowling praised Anelli and The Leaky Cauldron on her personal website in May 2007. Anelli had instituted a strict policy against spoilers of the seventh book, saying, "We just don't want someone taking what J.K. Rowling has earned away from her, which is the right to tell us where these mysteries end." Rowling agreed, saying, "I want the readers who have, in many instances, grown up with Harry, to embark on the last adventure they will share with him without knowing where they are going."

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