Ninguém, pelo menos não deliberadamente.
Em uma entrevista no Edinburgh Book Festival em 2004 , ela foi questionada sobre Personagem de Skeeter. Isto é onde nós aprendemos que Skeeter apareceu em um rascunho inicial de Pedra Filosofal , e ela também afirma que Skeeter não é baseado em nenhuma pessoa real:
I love Rita. You know when Harry walks into the Leaky Cauldron for the first time, in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone? Everyone says, “You’re back” and he realises for the first time that he is famous. In a very early draft, Rita, a journalist, was there and she ran up to him. For some reason she was called Bridget—I forget why. Anyway, she detained him too long in the Leaky Cauldron and I really needed to get him moving, so I thought that I would not put her there.
As I was writing book one, I was planning the rest, and book four was supposed to be where Harry’s fame became a burden to him. It really starts to weigh on him when he is exposed to the wider wizarding world so I thought that that would be the perfect place for Rita to come in. She was still called Bridget at the time.
I didn’t realise that by the time I wrote book four I would have met quite a lot of Ritas and people would assume that I was writing Rita in response to what had happened to me, which was not in fact the truth. However, I am not going to deny that writing Rita was a lot more fun having met a few people I had met. I actually quite like Rita. She is loathsome—morally, she’s horrible—but I can’t help admiring her toughness. She is very determined to do the job and there is something quite engaging about that.
Muitas pessoas fizeram suposições sobre quem poderia ser baseado em Skeeter, mas Rowling e seus editores têm sido consistentes em dizer que não houve inspiração deliberada.
Houve uma questão relevante anteriormente na mesma entrevista:
Are any of your characters based on real people?
The only character who is deliberately based on a real person is Gilderoy Lockhart.
Ela nunca revelou em quem Lockhart se baseou, embora tenha havido palpites na mídia. Se Rita Skeeter fosse deliberadamente baseada em uma pessoa real, imagino que ela nos diria - ou que Skeeter era baseado em uma pessoa real, ou que Lockhart não era a única - como ela poderia manter a identidade dessa pessoa em segredo. Não vejo razão para ela mentir diretamente sobre isso na segunda citação.