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Simon & Schuster Cancels Book Deal with Milo Yiannopoulos

February 23, 2017

After months of outcry and protest, Simon & Schuster announced its plans to cancel its controversial $250,000 book deal with self-proclaimed “alt-right” Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, Publishers Weekly reports.

The publisher’s statement reads, briefly: “After careful consideration, Simon & Schuster and its Threshold Editions imprint have cancelled publication of Dangerous by Milo Yiannopoulos.”

Dangerous was slated for release in June, and it’s widely believed that the deal was cancelled because of a video interview in which Yiannopoulos makes statements in support of pedophilia. After being disinvited from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) because of the interview, Simon & Schuster released its statement a few hours later.

Roxane Gay, who pulled her book from publication by Simon & Schuster in late January to protest its deal with Yiannopoulos, writes on her blog that this latest move is business as usual.

In canceling Milo’s book contract, Simon & Schuster made a business decision the same way they made a business decision when they decided to publish that man in the first place. When his comments about pedophilia/pederasty came to light, Simon & Schuster realized it would cost them more money to do business with Milo than he could earn for them. They did not finally “do the right thing” and now we know where their threshold, pun intended, lies.

Likewise, Gabrielle Bellot, argues in Literary Hub that it’s too little, too late: in agreeing to publish Yiannopoulos’s book in the first place, Simon & Schuster overlooked his many other damaging statements, including Yiannopoulos’s earlier comments linking a transgender lifestyle with pedophilia.

Bellot, who is a transgender woman, writes, “I wondered when Simon and Schuster might decide it [sic] Mr. Yiannopoulos had bashed trans people one too many times—the sixteenth time? The twenty-eighth? Perhaps the thirty-second will do it.

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