Bartholomew's Notes

A further post on Milo Yiannopoulos’s Facebook page:

This week, for political gain, the media and the Republican establishment accused a child abuse victim of enabling child abuse. It’s sick.

This, of course, is Yiannopoulos’s new perspective on sexual experiences that he claims to have had while underage and growing up in the county of Kent in southeast England in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He revealed these incidents in a provocative and jocular manner on a radio podcast last year, in which he claimed to have lost his virginity aged 13, or maybe even  at 12, “in an interracial fivesome with a drag queen”, and subsequently to have “fucked” a teacher and to have performed fellatio on a priest.

Yiannopoulos used his experiences to argue that while he agreed that 16 years old was “probably roughly the right age” for a statutory age of consent, he was someone who had been able to give informed consent at an earlier age. He also expressed sympathy for female teachers who are targeted by predatory boys, with whom they then fall in love.

These views came to wider attention a couple of days ago, and they have not been received well. Fatally for a professional controversialist whose whole act is based around shrugging off provocations as jokes and mocking anyone who is offended or upset by what he says, Yiannopoulos felt the need to issue a clarification (for “idiots”, initially) and to express regret as his lucrative media career imploded around him.

Thus he yesterday gave a press conference, in which he again referred to having been abused – although full sex has now been reduced to “touching” and the initial “fivesome” incident has disappeared from view:

“Between the ages of 13 and 16, two men touched me in ways they should not have. One of those men was a priest.” At the time, he said, “I didn’t perceive what was happening as abusive. But I can look back now and see that it was. I still don’t view myself as a victim, but clearly I am one.”

This seems to be having it both ways – he doesn’t want to see himself as a victim, as that would be weak, but he wants others to do so, since that exposes the media as “sick”.

But if he now regards these two men as transgressors, what is he going to do about it? This is not something that happened in the distant past; he turned 13 in October 1997 and 16 in October 2000. Even if the encounter with his teacher did not happen until he was 16 (the above is ambiguous), but before it became illegal for teachers to have relationships with pupils of any age (a law to that effect was brought in during 2001), such a predatory individual obviously needs to be barred from the profession and made the subject of a more general investigation.*

If Yiannopoulos is being truthful about his past, and if he now truly believes that he was victimised by two men, should he not now make a statement about it to Kent Police in England? He has boasted that he has used his journalism to “expose child abusers”, and in his press conference he has promised that when his book is published he will give 10% of the proceeds to child abuse charities. So, why not now take action against two alleged abusers who may have continued to prey on others in the decade-and-a-half since he turned 16?

Footnote
* The age of consent for male homosexuality was actually 18 until early 2001, when it was reduced to 16. This now applies retroactively.

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