Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has resigned from his position at Breitbart News after controversial comments about pedophilia surfaced over the weekend and sparked outrage.
"I do not support child abuse," Yiannopoulos said Tuesday at a news conference. "It's a disgusting crime of which I have personally been a victim."
He said he plans to launch a media venture in the coming weeks and said he has been approached by other publishers since Simon & Schuster announced Monday that it had dropped Giannopoulos' upcoming book, "Dangerous."
In a statement, he praised Breitbart News for providing him with a platform that "allowed me to carry conservative and libertarian ideas to communities that would otherwise have never heard them."
In a separate statement released to The New York Times, Breitbart News said Yiannopoulos resigned Tuesday morning as an editor at Breitbart Tech.
BREITBART statement on Milo's resignation: pic.twitter.com/Enhro1rL0p
— Michael M. Grynbaum (@grynbaum) February 21, 2017
"Milo Yiannopoulos' bold voice has sparked much-needed debate on important cultural topics confronting universities, the LGBTQ community, the press and the tech industry," the conservative news organization said.
He resigned amid scrutiny over previous comments that resurfaced over the weekend by the conservative Reagan Battalion blog. The blog shared video clips Sunday on Twitter in which Yiannopoulos discussed Jews, sexual consent, statutory rape, child abuse and homosexuality.
In one of the clips shared by the Reagan Battalion blog, Yiannopoulos defends sexual relationships between men and boys as young as 13 years old. He also speaks approvingly of his own sexual relationship with a 29-year-old priest when he was 17.
"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," he said.
He said he stepped down Tuesday to keep from taking attention away from Breitbart News.
"When your friends have done right by you, you do right by them," he said. "For me, now, that means stepping aside so my colleagues at Breitbart can get back to the great work they do."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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