Tyson Fury storms out of interview over question about homophobic comments
Boxer Tyson Fury has stormed out of an interview after he was asked about his history of homophobic comments.
The heavyweight boxing champ attracted real-life fury in 2015 by claiming that homosexuality and paedophilia will bring about the apocalypse.
The boxer stood by his comments, claiming that sex with children was legalised by a fictional “Gay Rights Act 1977“, but later said the entire thing had been a joke.
Fury has since made a comeback to boxing – but he didn’t seem particularly keen to apologise for his past comments in an interview with ITV News.
The boxer chatted to the news outlet for just 30 seconds of a pre-arranged interview, before storming away from the journalist attempting to ask him about the issue.
ITV News reporter Nick Wallis had begun to ask him: “You’ve said things in the past that people have found abhorrent. They’ve accused you of misogyny, they’ve accused you of homophobia.”
But Fury cut in: “No comment. Don’t even go there.”
The reporter shifted tact, asking: “Do you accept you’ve got to win over a larger number of people, coming back this time, before you can be fully accepted?”
But the smirking boxer only said “No comment.”
He added: “I’m a boxer, I’m not interested in politics or anything else. Boxing only, thank you.”
Watch the moment Tyson Fury ‘terminated’ our interview: https://t.co/la3Ve7nMTY pic.twitter.com/NdtLVzO4jX
— ITV News (@itvnews) April 12, 2018
Losing patience with the reporter’s apparent follow-up question about doping, Fury abruptly stormed out of the interview, yelling “terminated” at the camera.
Fury has previously claimed that homosexuality is “one of the three things that will lead to the apocalypse.”
He said: “There are only three things that need to be accomplished before the devil comes home.”
“One of them is homosexuality being legal in countries, one of them is abortion and the other one’s paedophilia.
“Who would have thought in the 50s and 60s that those first two would be legalised?
“When I say paedophiles can be made legal, that sounds like crazy talk doesn’t it?
“But back in the 50s and early 60s, for them first two to be made legal would have been looked on as a crazy man again.”
The boxer was controversially nominated for the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year (SPOTY) award 2015, just weeks after the comments.
Fury has long refused to directly apologise for his homophobic comments – and when asked at the SPOTY awards ceremony about them, he repeatedly queried the meaning of the question.
However, after being prompted three times, he said: “I’ve said a lot of stuff in the past, you know. None of it’s with intentions to hurt anybody.
“It’s all a bit of tongue-in-cheek and it’s all fun and games for me.
“I’m not really a serious kind of person. Everything’s happy go-lucky with Tyson Fury.
“If I’ve said anything in the past that’s hurt anybody, I apologise to anybody that’s hurt.”
Fury was suspended from boxing in 2016 by the UK Anti-Doping (UKAD) over a positive drugs test and later accepted a two-year backdated ban, but is now attempting to make a comeback.
