Where Are They Now? Character Game

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 187595

 Bart wrote:
>     I never could figure out how Umbridge kept her position after torturing students, at least one attempt to perform an Unforgivable  Curse (before they were made legal), and sending the dementors against Harry and Dudley.

Carol responds:
How would anyone except the students (only two that we know of, Harry and Lee Jordan) know about the quill that used their own blood to write lines? We know for a fact that Harry never reported it to McGonagall, and Dumbledore was avoiding him that year. And Fudge didn't know about the (never performed) Crucio, either. ("What Cornelius doesn't know won't hurt him," Umbridge says as she contemplates performing it.) Both Harry and Draco attempted Crucios (Harry twice) without getting in trouble for them. Even if the Ministry can detect them (and the evidence that they can is unclear), they wouldn't know who performed the spell, any more than they knew that Dobby performed the Hover Charm in CoS, Barty Jr. cast the Dark Mark in GoF, and Tom Riddle killed his father and grandparents. In the last two instances, the MoM found the "guitly wand" but not the perpetrator. No one knew that she'd sent the Dementors, either. She confessed it to Harry, but he never reported it or testified against her. As far as Fudge and anyone else at the Ministry (including Scrimgeour, who must have been baffled when Harry shook his fist in his [Scrimgeour's] face), Umbridge had been a DADA teacher following a Ministry-approved curriculum, a Ministry-appointed High Inquisitor imposing Ministry guidelines on the staff and students, and headmistress after Dumbledore was (supposedly) caught plotting against the Ministry. Fudge and Scrimgeour probably thought that she, like Fudge, had been deluded about Dumbledore's ambitions, Voldemort's comeback, and Harry's instability. They would have no way of knowing that she sent the Dementors (which appeared to be outside the Ministry's control) to either suck Harry's soul or force him to produce a Patronus and get him expelled, simultaneously undermining Harry's protector, Dumbledore. (I'm pretty sure that she was behind Fudge's paranoia, too, or at least recognized it and fanned the flames of his panic.)

Carol, quite sure that Scrimgeour knew nothing about Umbridge's quill, much less her contemplated Crucio, or he would never have mentioned her to Harry, whom he was trying to recruit as a "mascot"