Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

Milo Yiannopoulos Publisher Hits Back Over Lucrative Book Deal

When infamous Breitbart senior editor and proponent of the so-called “alt-right” Milo Yiannopoulos was offered a $250,000 book contract deal from Threshold Editions, a Simon & Schuster imprint, authors, critics, and artists responded with fury. (The Chicago Review of Books, for instance, responded by announcing that it would review no Simon & Schuster titles in 2017.)

On Monday, Simon & Schuster’s President and CEO Carolyn Reidy released a letter, addressed to concerned authors, explaining the company’s decision to publish Yiannopoulos’ book “Dangerous.”

Buzzfeed acquired the letter and published it for the masses.

In the letter, Reidy described the meetings Threshold conducted with Yiannopoulos, where the writer pitched his book as a “substantive examination of the issues of political correctness and free speech, issues that are already much-discussed and argued and fought over in both mainstream and alternative media and on campuses and in schools across the country.”

Throughout the letter, Reidy emphasized the company’s admonishment of hate speech.

“I want to make clear that we do not support or condone, nor will we publish, hate speech,” she wrote. “Not from our authors. Not in our books. Not at our imprints. Not from our employees and not in our workplace.”

The notion that Yiannopoulos’ book will not promulgate hate speech may be difficult for the many readers, writers, and celebrities who have vocalized their disapproval of the deal — including actress Leslie Jones, a victim of Yiannopoulos’ online trolling — to believe.

Reidy situated the letter in a larger national context.

“There is no question that we are living in a time when many are feeling uncertainty and fear,” she wrote. “It is a moment when political passions are running hotter and stronger than at any time in recent history, and cultural divides across the country seem to be getting wider.”

On December 30, Simon & Schuster released a statement to the public responding to outcry over initial news of the book deal, made public by The Hollywood Reporter on December 29. The statement advised readers to “withhold judgment until they have had a chance to read the actual contents of the book.”

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.