Milo Yiannopoulos has ended his $10 million lawsuit against Simon & Schuster, having settled for...Zero. Nothing. Nada.
He brought the lawsuit last year for breach of contract after S&S cancelled his book deal when reports of his condoning pedophilia surfaced.
As you may recall, one of the consequences was that, to the enjoyment of many, last December the notes from the editor about just how unbelievably awful his manuscript was became public.
Milo ended up representing himself (more on that in a minute). He whined to the judge that the December mirth was caused by Simon & Schuster leaking against him in order to embarrass him...whereas in fact the annotated manuscript with editorial comments was posted to the court's public docket.
Why was he representing himself? Well, he had instructed his lawyers to make sweeping discovery requests against Simon & Schuster for proprietary financial information. The Simon & Schuster lawyers pointed out to the judge that this was certainly a fishing expedition not related to the case — and to prove it they, they showed the court posts that Milo made on social media boasting that he was starting his own imprint and he was strategizing to take all of Simon & Schuster’s best authors.
Therefore, the judge ruled that the discovery materials couldn’t be shared with Milo — they were for his lawyer’s eyes only. So, Milo, clever boy that he is, dismissed his lawyers and and turned up in court one day saying I’m now my own lawyer, hand over all those documents.
The judge said no.
Today he threw in the towel. The suit is dismissed with prejudice (meaning it can’t be refiled) and S&S issued a press release saying: "We are pleased that Mr. Yiannopoulos’ lawsuit has been withdrawn, with prejudice, and with no payment. We stand by our decision to terminate the publication of Mr. Yiannopoulos’ book."