Larry Flynt death: The wild life of a porn mogul who loved naked hostesses and was left paralysed by white supremacist

A NOTORIOUS pornographer who courted controversy and sought to “offend everyone on an equal-opportunity basis”, Larry Flynt was a man with many enemies.

But having survived an assassination attempt which saw him hit by bullets in his stomach and spine in 1978 – as well as numerous legal challenges which sought to censor his smut – Flynt died naturally of heart failure on Wednesday aged 78.

The cigar-chomping, bling-loving American, who was played by Woody Harrelson in 1996 movie The People vs. Larry Flynt, built a $100million porn empire that stretched from magazines to private clubs, a Los Angeles casino, an online sex-toy store and more.

He was best known for his magazine Hustler which repeatedly tested the boundaries of free speech with its extremely explicit sexual content.

It infamously published everything from topless pictures of former First Lady Jackie Kennedy Onassis to images depicting gang rape.

Flynt spent much of his life defending himself against charges of obscenity in and out of court – and it was near a courthouse that he was shot by a white supremacist serial killer who took exception to an interracial porn shoot printed in Hustler.

After being shot, Flynt was paralysed from the waist down and used a $17,000 gold plated and velvet-upholstered wheelchair.

A self-styled defender of America’s First Amendment – which promises freedom of speech and press – he delighted in causing controversy.

His magazine offended an incredible range of groups from left-wing feminists to anti-porn conservatives and just about everyone in between.

“I wanted to offend everyone on an equal-opportunity basis,” he wrote in his 1996 autobiography, An Unseemly Man.

“I decided to run cartoons lampooning blacks, whites, Jews, Christians, rich and poor.”

Naked waitresses and extreme porn

From an early age, Flynt showed the world he had no desire to live conventionally.

Born to an alcoholic father and a teenage mother in a poverty-stricken part of Kentucky, he dropped out of school at 15 and used a fake birth certificate to join the Army.

When they kicked him out after seven months, he lied again and joined the Navy as a radio operator for five years.

After that, in 1965 he spent $1,800 of his savings to buy his mother’s bar in Dayton, Ohio which would be the beginning of his business empire.

Flynt brought in naked hostesses to serve drinks and would work 20-hour days, taking amphetamines to stay awake.

His business was soon making $1,000 a week and he used the cash to buy other bars.

By the early 1970s, he had the template for his Hustler adult clubs. Then he struck upon the idea of transforming the club’s basic newsletter into a full-blown porn magazine.

From its first issue in 1974, Hustler magazine was designed to shock.

Flynn calculated that men wanted “raw sex” – not the stylised version presented by glossier rivals.

He said: “Playboy and Penthouse were parading their pornography as art, with the airbrushing and the soft lens. I realised that if we became more explicit, we could get a huge piece of this market.”

With this in mind, nothing was off the table for Hustler – from close up shots of female genitalia to depictions of gang rape, fairytale characters engaging in sexual acts, and one cover which showed a woman being fed head-first into a meat grinder.

One regular cartoon character, Chester the Molester, was shown tricking pre-pubscent girls into sexually compromising situations.

And in 1975, Hustler created a global scandal when it printed paparazzi photographs of former First Lady Jackie Kennedy Onassis sunbathing topless while on holiday – paying $18,000 for the shots after rivals Playboy and Penthouse rejected the pictures.

As Hustler raced to become ever more hardcore, many people were appalled.

But Flynt revelled in defending his work, framing it as a battle for free speech.

“My position has always been that there’s two types of people opposed to pornography,” he once said during a TV interview, “Those who don’t know what they’re talking about, and those who don’t know what they’re missing.”

At the height of its popularity, Hustler had a readership of three million, allowing Flynt to get into other business ventures including porn movies and mainstream magazines.

But his dirty empire kept him in constant legal trouble, with his first of several prosecutions for obscenity in 1976.

During another trial, he wore an American flag as a nappy, which caused him to be jailed for six months for desecrating the flag.

His most high profile court battle came in 1983 when televangelist Jerry Falwell sued Flynt for $45million.

Falwell argued he should be financially compensated for the “ridicule and emotional distress” caused by a satirical cartoon published in Hustler, which showed him boasting of losing his virginity to his mother in an outhouse.

The case went all the way to the Supreme Court who ruled unanimously in Flynt’s favour, saying that offensive speech aimed at public figures like Falwell was constitutionally protected as long as it wasn’t presented as factual.

After the trial, the porn mogul and the preacher who sued him became unlikely friends.

Gunned down by white supremacist murderer

A more dramatic court showdown was to come. While defending himself against more obscenity charges, Flynt and his lawyer, Gene Reeves Jr., were gunned down outside a courthouse near Atlanta, Georgia, in 1978.

Flynt was paralysed by the attack and left suffering excruciating pain in his legs and related health problems for the rest of his life.

Joseph Paul Franklin, a KKK member and serial killer, later confessed to the shooting, saying he was motivated by interracial pornography in Hustler.


Franklin was executed by lethal injection 2013 – something which Flynt publicly opposed.

He didn’t want Franklin dead, but he did want revenge.

“I would love an hour in a room with him and a pair of wire-cutters and pliers so I could inflict the same damage on him that he inflicted on me,” he wrote in the Hollywood Reporter.

'You have to tolerate Larry Flynt'

Flynt’s opposition to the execution of his attacker wasn’t the only belief he held which shocked people.

In 1977, he briefly declared himself a born-again Christian after having a divine vision while on his private jet, vowing his magazine would “hustle for God”.

For a brief spell – during which he was friends with evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton, sister of President Jimmy Carter – Flynt toned down Hustler’s content.

But before long he had declared himself an atheist once more – and Hustler went back to its old ways.

Having dabbled with religion, Flynt also tried his hand at politics, making a “tongue-in-cheek” run for president in 1984 as a Republican.

Fourteen years later, he declared he was a Democrat – predictably supporting Bill Clinton in the impeachment proceedings which followed the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Flynt has four surviving children from five marriages – having racked up three divorces by the time he was 33.

His oldest daughter, Tonya Flynt-Vega, is a Christian anti-porn activist who published a book, Hustled, in 1998 accusing Flynt of sexually abusing her as a child.

Flynt denied the claims.

His fourth wife, Althea, was pictured in Hustler and went on to become the magazine’s co-publisher, keeping it running when Flynt was shot.

She was just 17 when she met Flynt by applying to be a go-go dancer at one of his clubs.

They married in 1976 and stayed together until her death 11 years later when she drowned in the bath of their Bel-Air mansion, aged 33.

In 1998, Flynt married his fifth wife, Elizabeth Berrios, his former nurse.

That marriage came two years after the release of the Oscar-nominated film about his life and legal troubles, The People Vs Larry Flynt.

The film was criticised by some for sanitising Flynt’s career and views.

MORE IN NEWS

'I'M OKAY'

Get to know West Virginia reporter Tori Yorgey

BETRAYED

Man who betrayed Anne Frank to Nazis in bid to save own family finally revealed

'SHATTERED DREAMS'

Dad's devastation after his wife and 3 kids die trying to cross Channel

HAUNTED

My son was murdered by gay serial killer – I should have saved his other victims

But according to the man himself, the nastier side of him was the cost of preserving free speech.

He said: “My position is that you pay a price to live in a free society, and that price is toleration of some things you don’t like,” he told the Seattle Times in 1996.

“You have to tolerate the Larry Flynts of this world.”

    Source: Read Full Article

    Previous post Daughter, 4, asked why ‘mummy was covered in ketchup’ after finding her mum ‘slaughtered by her ex-boyfriend’
    Next post Who is Trump lawyer Michael Van der Veen?