‘Alt-right’ poster child Milo Yiannopoulos is suing publishing house Simon & Schuster for $10 million after breaching the contract to publish his book, Dangerous.
In newly-released court documents outlining why the firm cancelled the “unacceptable” tome, Simon & Schuster provides details of brutal comments attached to the manuscript.
They reveal how senior editor Mitchell Ivers was clearly unimpressed with what he was supposed to make sing, repeatedly pointing to the author’s vanity and crude jokes that fall flat.
This section of Simon & Schuster’s rebuttal to Milo’s lawsuit over DANGEROUS. ? pic.twitter.com/JxydVQpx4f
An email to Yiannopoulos and his agent in January 2017 made clear the book would not be published in its current form, as annotations stating a section “doesn’t pass intellectual muster” and another was “unclear, unfunny, delete”.
Software engineer Sarah Mei accessed all of the edits to the manuscript and wrote a comprehensive summary of the editor’s frustrations on Twitter. Screenshots of the most entertaining notes have since gone viral.
I went to the New York county clerk’s website and found this filing. It includes the entire manuscript with allllllll the editor’s comments as exhibit B. https://t.co/fb9yptldbO
December 28, 2017
The most brutally frank critiques, which speak of one inflammatory yet badly-conceived chapter after another, include:
“Delete entire chapter. The book is better overall without hitting these ‘ugly people’ notes in the other chapters and better overall by deleting this one.”
The notes by Milo Yiannopolous’s editor are extremely relatable. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had to tell @stephenkb this. pic.twitter.com/y32zLfKvnt — Helen Lewis (@helenlewis) December 28, 2017
“This is definitely not the place for more of your narcissism”
Mr. Ivers is getting pretty sick of your bullshit, young man. pic.twitter.com/o4TEyYhomi
“The use of of a phrase like ‘two-faced backstabbing bitches’ diminishes your overall point”
“Beauty regime moved to the box at the end of the chapter, after the Nietzsche section”
Ivers, whose LinkedIn profile lists him as a book editor with more than 20 years experience, later “retweeted without comment” someone suggesting his overall review described the book as “at best, a superficial work full of incendiary jokes with no coherent or sophisticated analysis of political issues”.
Yiannopoulos was permanently banned from Twitter in 2016 after his role in the online harassment of the Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones.
The full court documents and notes can be found here. A version of Dangerous was self-published this summer.