After making controversial comments about how people convicted of sex offenses do not deserve such harsh punishments in American prisons, author John Grisham has now withdrawn his statements, claiming to regret those remarks, Fox News reported.
While speaking with The Telegraph on Wednesday, the best-selling author of "The Firm" and "A Time To Kill" stated that too many people like him - "60-year-old white men" - are being wrongly punished for looking at online pictures of underage kids, further claiming that he has "no sympathy for real pedophiles - God, please lock those people up. But many of these guys do not deserve harsh prison sentences, and that's what they're getting."
The 59-year-old prolific writer, who has sold some 275 million books in 25 years of writing crime and law thrillers, narrated a story of how his "good buddy from law school" got arrested in a child porn sting by the Canadian Royal Mounted Police and locked up for three years in jail.
"It happened to a lawyer friend of mine, a good buddy from law school. They haven't hurt anyone. They deserve some type of punishment, whatever, but 10 years in prison?"
"His drinking was out of control, and he went to a website. It was labeled '16-year-old wannabe hookers' or something like that. And it said '16-year-old girls'. So he went there. Downloaded some stuff - it was 16-year-old girls who looked 30," the author told the British paper in advance of the release of his latest novel, "Gray Mountain."
"He shouldn't have done it. It was stupid, but it wasn't 10-year-old boys. He didn't touch anything. And God, a week later there was a knock on the door: 'FBI!' and it was a sting set up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to catch people - sex offenders - and he went to prison for three years," he said
Although Grisham never claimed to have looked at child porn himself, he ended up defending the large amounts of sex offenders who are locked up in jail, according to New York Daily News.
"We've got prisons now filled with guys my age, 60-year-old white men, in prison, who have never harmed anyone," he said. "Who would never touch a child, but they got online one night, started surfing around, probably had too much to drink whatever and pushed the wrong buttons, and went too far and went into child porn or whatever."
"And there is so many of them now. There's so many 'sex offenders' - that's what they're called - that they put them in the same prison. Like they are a bunch of perverts or something. Thousands of them. We've gone nuts with this incarceration," he said.
Obviously Grisham's remarks caused immediate backlash on social media, with some of his fans claiming they would boycott his books. On Thursday, the author issued an apology.
"Anyone who harms a child for profit or pleasure, or who in any way participates in child pornography -online or otherwise - should be punished to the fullest extent of the law," he said in a statement to FOX411. "My comments made two days ago during an interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph were in no way intended to show sympathy for those convicted of sex crimes, especially the sexual molestation of children. I can think of nothing more despicable. I regret having made these comments, and apologize to all."
