Dragging himself—like some sort of relentless, attention-fueled Terminator—from the trash heap of two dozen news cycles ago, former Breitbart mouthpiece Milo Yiannopoulos has emerged to sue book publisher Simon & Schuster for $10 million over a book deal gone south. Yiannapolous’ complaint centers on the the publisher’s decision to cancel his book, Dangerous, after the company came under heavy media scrutiny for giving Yiannapolous a fresh new platform for his “Aw, shucks, I’m just talkin’” approach to right-wing hate speech.
Yiannapolous’ book deal—for which he’d already been paid $80,000 of a $225,000 advance—was shut down shortly after he finally managed to find a topic capable of pissing off his conservative followers just as much as he’d already ticked off the left, when audio of him talking positively about sexual relationships between teenagers and older gay men surfaced online. But the 83-page lawsuit goes well beyond that singular scandal, quoting tweets from celebrities like Leslie Jones and Sarah Silverman that condemned the publisher for working with Yiannopoulos, in an attempt to prove that Simon & Schuster caved to popular pressure when it scuttled the book just a few months before it was set to go to print.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, as the book’s release date got closer, S&S entered into a number of heated conversations with their pet scorpion, asking him to end his online feud with Jones, stop showing up on programs like HBO’s Real Time, and generally do the exact opposite of a normal promotional tour. But Yiannapolous continued to sting away—as is his nature—performing the exact same sorts of actions that made Simon & Schuster think it would be profitable to get into bed with him in the first place. Now, he’s seeking damages as determined by a jury trial, but “in no event less than Ten Million Dollars” over the fallout around Dangerous being shelved. Not that Yiannapolous is hurting for cash: He recently raised more than $12 million to organize events celebrating his bottom-of-the-barrel approach to the concept of free speech.