Yiannopoulos drops $10M book suit vs. S&S

MILO

Yiannopoulos, a former Brietbart News senior editor and alt-right provocateur, dropped his $10 million breach-ofcontract lawsuit against Simon & Schuster.

Yiannopoulos claims he did end up pocketing the first $80,000 of a book advance that was originally going to be $250,000. But S&S said it is “baloney” to say the payment was a result of the suit.

S&S had already written off the initial part of the advance paid to him months before the lawsuit landed. When it canceled the book deal, it gave him back the manuscript and said he was free to publish it elsewhere.

Yiannopoulos made his reputation as an outspoken critic of any- thing that smacked of political correctness. He routinely blasted feminism, Islam and some aspects of gay life — despite being gay himself.

Shortly after he landed the deal, Yiannopoulos boasted to The Hollywood Reporter in December 2016, “I met with top execs at Simon & Schuster earlier in the year and spent half an hour trying to shock them with lewd jokes and outrageous opinions. I thought they were going to have me escorted from the building — but instead they offered me a wheelbarrow full of money.”

News of the signing immediately triggered a backlash from critics in publishing and media circles, who blasted the publisher for granting an outlet for hate speech. Others, however, defended the signing on free-speech grounds. S&S’s Threshold imprint specializes in nonfiction conservative writing from authors including Glenn Beck and Donald Trump.

But the controversy that caused S&S to finally cancel the deal was a video from an old interview that surfaced in which Yiannopoulos appeared to endorse pedophilia. With that, S&S canceled the contract in March 2017.

The book, “Dangerous,” was eventually self-published. It briefly hit best-seller lists and has sold more than 80,000 copies, according to Bookscan. Shortly after it hit shelves, Yiannopoulos filed the breach-of-contract suit. It was withdrawn with prejudice in New York state court on Feb. 15, meaning it cannot be reintroduced.

And what about the $80,000 that S&S had doled out when the contract was canceled? “We never asked for it back,” said an S&S spokesman.

Playmate pay

Two groups have now asked the Federal Election Commission to investigate whether a $150,000 payment by National Enquirer owner American Media Inc. to former Playboy Playmate and alleged Donald Trump mistress Karen McDougal constituted an illegal campaign contribution by the publisher to Trump’s election committee.

People for Free Speech last week asked the FEC to probe the matter. Common Cause, a government watchdog group, on Tuesday filed a second complaint with the FEC.

“Complainants have reason to believe that a payment of $150,000 from American Media Inc. to Ms. Karen McDougal was an unreported in-kind contribution to President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign committee,” according to the Feb. 16 suit by People for Free Speech, citing publicly available information. It says the funds were paid “for the purpose of influencing the 2016 general election.”

Trump has denied the affair, calling it “more fake news.” AMI said it made the payment to McDougal but never ran her story because it could not independently verify it.

The alleged payment was first disclosed only days before the election by the Wall Street Journal, but was given new velocity in recent days by a Ronan Farrow report in The New Yorker,r, which has handwritten notes from McDougal recalling the affair.

Farrow reported that AMI, which is headed by Trump pal CEO David Pecker, essentially engaged in what is known as a “catch and kill” strategy. That refers to paying for a subject’s story and getting a nondisclosure agreement signed barring the subject from speaking about the matter to others — while never publishing the story. AMI said the agreement was subsequently amended to allow her to answer press inquiries on the matter. Farrow said AMI hired a p.r. person to control the inquiries.

Separately, some Trump supporters are pushing back against the Farrow article, saying the handwritten notes from McDougal that were obtained by Farrow via her friend John Crawford were not notes written during the alleged relationship in 2006, but notes written more than 10 years later. The notes were said to detail allegations of a consensual affair begun in 2006, about two months after Trump’s wife Melania had given birth to son Barron. “The article does not present Karen McDougal’s written account as being made simultaneously with the events themselves,” said a spokeswoman for The New Yorker. “Rather, the article makes clear that the idea to sell her story to American Media Inc. first occurred in 2016. Furthermore, her written account is supported by additional sourcing and documentation referenced in the article.”