Outrageous pornographer who won a Supreme Court battle
Larry Flynt 1942-2021
Larry Flynt was a pornographer who made a fortune from
Hustler magazine, survived an assassination attempt that left him paralysed from the waist down, and fought a series of free speech battles, one of which went to the Supreme Court. In 1996, he was the subject of a hit Hollywood movie, The People vs. Larry
Flynt, starring Woody Harrelson. Some were outraged by what they saw as an attempt to glamourise a publisher who’d used pictures of women being degraded to sell his magazines.
Flynt, however, liked to call himself a “smut peddlar who cares”. He claimed to support the #MeToo movement, and in 2017, he took out a full page advertisement in The Washington Post offering $10m for dirt that would lead to Donald Trump’s impeachment. “Just because I publish pornography does not mean that I am not concerned about the social ills that all of us are,” he once said.
Born in 1942, Flynt was the son of a sharecropper, and grew up in poverty in Kentucky. In his home town, he noted, “the main industry was jury duty”. He dropped out of school aged 15, and lied about his age to join the army (later transferring to the navy). After several years in the services, he settled in Ohio, where he opened a drinking den called the Hillbilly Haven, and then a strip club, which he called Hustler. By 1975, he had been married and divorced three times, and owned a string of clubs across the state: Hustler magazine grew out of a newsletter he used to promote them. An early cover featured a naked woman being fed into a meatgrinder; inside there were close-up shots of women’s genitalia, making Playboy look tame. In 1974, a paparazzo approached with a series of shots of Jackie Onassis sunbathing topless. Other magazines wouldn’t touch them, but Flynt snapped them up. Hustler became the fastest-selling men’s magazine in the world, and Flynt a millionaire.
There were frequent obscenity trials, which he used to get more publicity for his publishing empire. He turned up to one hearing wearing only a US flag pinned around his middle like a nappy. It was outside a court in Georgia that he was almost killed. A white supremacist later confessed to the shooting, saying he’d objected to Hustler’s images of interracial couples. After that, Flynt used a $17,000 gold-plated wheelchair. But it was the magazine’s often vicious lampooning of public figures that led to his highest-profile case. In 1983, it published a spoof article in which Jerry Falwell – the televangelist and founder of Moral Majority – reminisced about having sex with his mother in an outhouse. Falwell sued for libel. A jury threw out the defamation charge, on the grounds that the article was clearly satirical, but awarded him $200,000 for “emotional distress”. Flynt contested the award, and ultimately won the case in the Supreme Court. “If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me,” he said, “then it will protect all of you. Because I’m the worst.” His memoir was entitled An Unseemly Man.
Bizarrely, he claimed after Falwell’s death that he and his onetime foe had become friends. “I always appreciated his sincerity,” he told the Los Angeles Times, “even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.”