New York, United States
Larry Flynt, nicknamed the king of porn from the United States and a controversial media figure, died in his Los Angeles hometown on Wednesday, his family confirmed to the media.
The tycoon became very popular after the founding of the pornographic magazine “Hustler” in 1974, with which he started an empire in the sex industry in which in 1978 he experienced all kinds of lawsuits, trials, incarcerations and an assassination attempt.
His life was documented in the movie “The People vs. Larry Flynt(1996), starring Woody Harrelson in the role of the well-known businessman, with whom he won an Oscar nomination.
Of humble origins, Flynt (Kentucky, 1942), opened its first strip club in 1964. It was the first of a series of locations it opened in the United States that cemented its brand in the United States. sex industry
In 1974 he started his magazine from pornographyHustler“, which quickly reached a circulation of 2 million copies.
The magazine rose to fame after the 1975 publication of images of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis bathing naked in Greece, as the competition featured snaps from a paparazzi
Later, unlike other publications such as Playboy and Penthouse, Flynt chose a different way of showing relationships sexual, rougher and more explicit, with the aim of making them more like the realities of the working class.
“I realized if we got more explicit we could get a lot from this market. I felt it sex raw was what men wanted. And he was right, ”he explained in an interview collected by the Washington Post.
But that goal gave way to a series of sadistic and disturbing images, including gang rapes, mutilations and even the lurid photo of a woman in a meat grinder sparking international controversy.
Flynt defended that this montage was an implicit criticism of the porn industry, but his explanation and his agitated defense of the United States Constitution’s First Amendment (freedom of speech) did not save him from complaints and prosecution for obscenity. He was even sentenced to imprisonment for contempt.
In 1978, on his way out of a trial, the businessman was shot and killed by a serial killer, leaving him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
In the decades that followed, he began producing and distributing movies, opening casinos, and flirting with politics by running for the aspiring governor of California in 2003.
During his lifetime, he supported and criticized Democrats and Republicans. In his last years, he was very difficult with the mandate of former President Donald Trump.