The journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates said on Monday that he and his family would not move into a $2.1 million Brooklyn brownstone they recently bought because media coverage of the purchase had made them worried for their safety.

Mr. Coates and his wife used a limited-liability corporation to shield their identities during the transaction — a legal maneuver frequently used by celebrities seeking privacy — but word of the sale leaked to The New York Post, which published an article about the purchase with pictures of the house last week. Real estate and other news organizations soon followed suit.

“Within a day of seeing these articles, my wife and I knew that we could never live in Prospect-Lefferts Garden, that we could never go back home,” Mr. Coates wrote on Monday in The Atlantic, where he is a national correspondent, referring to the Brooklyn neighborhood. “If anything happened to either of us, if anything happened to our son, we’d never forgive ourselves.”

Mr. Coates could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

Mr. Coates rose to fame in 2015 after the publication of his memoir “Between the World and Me,” which was written in the form of a letter to his son about the history of racial injustice in the United States. It was one of the most discussed books of the year and won the National Book Award for nonfiction.