Milo Yiannopoulos resigned from his position as senior editor at Breitbart News Tuesday after controversy surrounding his comments about the age of sexual consent. The 32-year-old right-wing commentator announced he would step down in a press release.

"Breitbart News has stood by me when others caved. They have allowed me to carry conservative and libertarian ideas to communities that would otherwise never have heard them," he said in the press release. "They have been a significant factor in my success. I'm grateful for that freedom and for the friendships I forged there."

“It would be wrong to allow my poor choice of words to detract from my colleagues’ important reporting, so today I am resigning from Breitbart, effective immediately. This decision is mine alone,” he said. “When your friends have done right by you, you do right by them. For me, now, that means stepping aside so my colleagues at Breitbart can get back to the great work they do.”

"Milo Yiannopoulos's bold voice has sparked much needed debate on important cultural topics confronting universities, the LGBTQ community, the press, and the tech industry," Breitbart said in a statement. "Milo notified us this morning of his decision to resign as editor of Breitbart Tech and we accepted his resignation."

The resignation came after an audio clip of Yiannopoulos on a 2016 episode of “The Drunken Peasants” podcast in which he discussed the age of consent for sexual relationships surfaced Sunday.

“There are certain people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age,” he could be heard saying in response to a question about “the whole consent thing.” Yiannopoulos, who is openly gay, noted that “I think it particularly happens in the gay world, by the way.”

“In the homosexual world, particularly, some of these relationships between younger boys and older men – the sort of ‘coming of age’ relationship – those relationships in which older men help those young boys discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable, sort of rock, where they can’t speak to their parents," he said. The comments were seen by many as condoning pedophilia.

Yiannopoulos attempted to clarify his comments in a Facebook post Sunday.

“I do not support pedophilia. Period,” he wrote, but many organizations and people had already distanced themselves from him. The Conservative Political Action Committee dropped him as keynote speaker at an event, and publisher Simon and Shuster pulled his book deal.

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