Almost exactly one year since he outraged the world when a video of one of his live performances emerged of him telling an audience members she was “gagging for a rape”, stand-up comic Dapper Laughs has declared himself a feminist.

The comedian, real name Daniel O’Reilly, spoke to women’s rights campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez for On Demand News to say that he believes in equal rights for men and women. “If you ask me if I consider myself a feminist then I'd say yeah, equal rights.”

Daniel O'ReillyDaniel O'Reilly, aka Dapper Laughs, is on the comeback trail

After that infamous video emerged and a barrage of negative PR and criticism, which led to ITV cancelling his comedy show ‘Dapper Laughs: On the Pull’, O’Reilly made an apologetic appearance on ‘Newsnight’ to say that his alter ego had been killed off.

However, he’s now back promoting a new stand-up DVD ‘Res-Erection’, and has assured people that he’s changed his ways and he’ll now be setting a higher standard for his social media followers – the medium in which Dapper Laughs originally came to prominence.

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“I caused a lot of outrage last year maybe because some of my Vines and viral videos overstepped the mark a little bit,” a clearly nervous O’Reilly told Criado-Perez. “Maybe I wasn't as conscious as I should have been about the message I was putting out to my younger fans.”

“I got frustrated before because as I said in another interview, ‘instead of condemning me, why not help me educate my fans’. And I got a lot of bad flak from journalists who said 'now Dapper Laughs thinks we should teach him that it's wrong to rape',” he said, “It really f****** infuriated me. So I left it for a bit and come back and yes, there are some subjects I've certainly learnt about.”

“I didn't realise how much women have to deal with sexual advances and sexual harassment on just an average day-to-day basis. I didn't know how much of a problem it was until my content about it come under so much fire. I've matured a lot and learnt about it.”

In the aftermath of the video, he and his family endured personal abuse as his name trended worldwide for nearly four days. However, he says that he wished he’d defended the original ‘rape’ remark in the first place, as it had been “taken out of context”.

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