LOS ANGELES (AP) – Larry Flynt, who turned his vulgar Hustler magazine into an empire while battling numerous First Amendment court battles and battling politicians with stunts like a Christmas card for the murder of Donald Trump, has passed away. He was 78.
Flynt, who was in declining health, died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Wednesday, his longtime attorney, Paul Cambria, told The Associated Press.
Shot in a 1978 assassination attempt, Flynt was paralyzed from the waist down, but refused to slow down, building a flamboyant reputation along with an estimated $ 100 million fortune.
He worked around in a gilded wheelchair with a velvet-covered seat.
“His doctors had said he should have died thirty years ago,” his cousin, Jimmy Flynt Jr., said Wednesday. “He outlived most of the doctors who took care of him.”
Born November 1, 1942 in Lakeville, Kentucky, Larry Claxton Flynt Jr. grew up in poverty. At the age of 21, Flynt had divorced twice and eventually found his calling by buying bars and turning them into Hustler clubs with topless dancers. In an effort to build a business, he published a newsletter that became Hustler magazine.
Founded in 1974, Hustler was unashamedly rude, approachable and hard-core, sticking his nose close to the pretensions of such powerful men’s magazines as Playboy.
The magazine featured raw, politically incorrect humor, photos of female genitals and sometimes SM and bondage scenes with women tied up and gagged. It shocked the public with a 1978 cover that depicts a woman being fed into a meat grinder.
It was no shock, then, that Flynt faced many legal battles over obscenity laws or that he deeply disliked religious judges and feminist groups.
Larry Flynt should be remembered as a scourge to society; He contributed directly to and benefited from the sexual exploitation of women for most of his career, and our culture is poorer because of it, ”said Dawn Hawkins, senior vice president and executive director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, on Wednesday. a statement .
Throughout his life, Flynt maintained that he was not only a pornographer, but also a staunch defender of freedom of speech.
“My position is that you pay a price to live in a free society, and that price is tolerance for some of the things you don’t like,” he once told the Seattle Times. “You have to tolerate the Larry Flynts of this world.”
The US Supreme Court agreed with him at least once when he won a long and bitter battle with Reverend Jerry Falwell. The televangelist sued him for libel after a 1983 alcohol ad from Hustler suggested that Falwell had lost his virginity to his mother in an outhouse.
That case and much of the rest of Flynt’s life were portrayed in the 1996 film, “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” which garnered Oscar nominations for director Milos Forman and Woody Harrelson, who played Flynt. Flynt had a cameo as a judge.
Flynt not only owned Hustler, but other niche publications, a video production company, numerous websites, two Los Angeles casinos, and dozens of Hustler boutiques selling adult-oriented products.
At the time of his death, he claimed to have video-on-demand operations in more than 55 countries and more than 30 Hustler Hollywood stores in the United States.
His successes were offset by tragedies.
While involved in a 1978 obscenity trial in Georgia, Flynt was shot twice by white supremacist serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin, who said he was outraged by a Hustler mixed-race photo layout. Franklin was executed for murder despite opposition from Flynt, who opposed the death penalty.
The shooting left Flynt in unrelenting pain for years, prompting him to give up his proclaimed born-again Christianity and embrace alcohol and painkillers.
He and his fourth wife, Althea, moved to Los Angeles and spent most of their time behind the £ 5,000 steel door of their mansion. Althea, who became addicted to heroin and contracted the AIDS virus, drowned in their bathtub in 1987 at the age of 33. Her death was accidentally declared.
“Althea was the best thing that ever happened to me,” said a desolate Flynt at the time.
Flynt’s behavior in those years was wildly erratic. He was removed from the U.S. Supreme Court after he interrupted proceedings in 1983 by yelling profanities at the judges.
He later appeared in a federal courthouse in Los Angeles wearing a Purple Heart and a diaper made of an American flag.
A sober Flynt eventually returned to work, pain relieved by surgery.
He spent his later years in the political arena. When California voters took back Governor Gray Davis in 2003, Flynt was among 135 candidates to replace him. He campaigned as ‘a dirty guy who cares’ and garnered more than 15,000 votes.
Flynt, who described himself as a progressive liberal, was not a fan of former President Donald Trump. In 2017, Flynt offered a $ 10 million reward for evidence leading to Trump’s impeachment, and in 2019 Larry Flynt Publications sent a Christmas card to some Republican congressmen showing Trump lying dead in a pool of blood. assassin said, “I just shot Donald Trump on Fifth Avenue and nobody killed me.” It was a reference to Trump’s bragging that he could do the same and wouldn’t lose votes.
Over the years, he expanded his business immensely into the Internet and the porn movie industry, noting how much they sold his magazines.
“You can see more on cable and satellite today than you could see in what I published in 1974,” Flynt told The Associated Press in 2003.
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This story features biographical information compiled by former Associated Press writer Greg Risling.