Milo Yiannopoulos, a conservative provocateur, has resigned from his editor position at the Breitbart News website after videos resurfaced this weekend showing him apparently expressing support for some instances of sex between adults and minors.
Yiannopoulos confirmed his resignation Tuesday in a statement.
“Breitbart News has stood by me when others caved,” the statement said. “They have allowed me to carry conservative and libertarian ideas to communities that would otherwise never have heard them.”
He went on to say that his “poor choice of words” in the video was now serving to “detract from my colleagues’ important reporting.”
He said the decision to resign was his.
“When your friends have done right by you, you do right by them,” the statement said. “For me, now, that means stepping aside so my colleagues at Breitbart can get back to the great work they do.”
Videos resurfaced over the weekend showing Yiannopoulos commenting on sex between gay adults and minors.
“In the homosexual world, particularly, some of those relationships between younger boys and older men — the sort of ‘coming of age’ relationship — those relationships in which those older men help those young boys discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable, sort of rock, where they can’t speak to their parents,” Yiannopoulos said in one of the videos.
Yiannopoulos has since said he was not trying to justify sex between adults and minors, and blamed the controversy on selective editing of old videos.
The Conservative Political Action Conference, the biggest annual gathering of conservatives, canceled an appearance Yiannopoulos was scheduled to make following the controversy.
Book publisher Simon and Schuster also terminated a deal to publish a book by Yiannopoulos.
In a radio interview earlier on Tuesday, Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow described Yiannopoulos’ comments as “absolutely indefensible.”
The Breitbart website, as a publication, backs President Trump.
Marlow did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
