Milo Yiannopoulos resigns from Breitbart amid pedophilia video controversy

Milo Yiannopoulos has resigned from Breitbart News, he announced Tuesday.

Yiannopoulos’ $250,000 book deal with Simon & Schuster was pulled and he was uninvited from speaking at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference after the Reagan Battalion, a conservative news source, tweeted video of Yiannopoulos defending older men having sexual relations with young boys.

Yiannopoulos said in a statement Tuesday he was resigning as the Technology Editor at Breitbart News, the news platform of the alt-right. He has engaged in derogatory speech against several groups, including transsexuals, but paints himself as a provocateur defending free speech. He has been permanently banned from Twitter for leading racist harassment against Leslie Jones after the actress and comedian appeared in the female reboot of Ghostbusters.

“Breitbart News has stood by me when others caved,” Yiannopoulos said in the statement.

“I would be wrong to allow my poor choice of words to detract from my colleagues’ important reporting, so today I am resigning from Breitbart, effective immediately,” he continued. “The decision is mine alone.”

[Editorial: Don’t let Milo Yiannopoulos taint message of free speech]

[Far-right editor’s appearance at UC Berkeley canceled amid violence]

[UC Davis embroiled in another free-speech controversy]

[Protest shuts down UC Davis event with ‘alt-right’ editor and former pharma exec]

Yiannopoulos said in a press conference that he would be announcing a news venture of his own in the next couple of weeks. He said he would focus less on journalism and more on “education and entertainment.”

In the videos, which are not new but went viral over the weekend, Yiannopoulos talked about having sex with older men as a teenager, suggested pedophilia does not apply to minors under the age of 18 but who have gone through puberty and suggested a priest who had relations with him when he was a teenager improved his sexual prowess.

The videos contain graphic language.

In a Facebook post on Monday, Yiannopoulos said the videos were “edited deceptively” and that he is disgusted by pedophilia.

“I’m partly to blame. My own experiences as a victim led me to believe I could say anything I wanted to on this subject, no matter how outrageous. But I understand that my usual blend of British sarcasm, provocation and gallows humor might have come across as flippancy, a lack of care for other victims or, worse, ‘advocacy,’” he wrote. “I deeply regret that. People deal with things from their past in different ways.”

This story was originally published February 21, 2017 at 12:01 PM with the headline "Milo Yiannopoulos resigns from Breitbart amid pedophilia video controversy."