Infamous Larry Flynt dies at 78

LOS ANGELES (TNS) — Larry Flynt, the son of a dirt-poor Kentucky sharecropper who amassed a pornographic publishing empire and later became an unlikely First Amendment champion and self-appointed arbitrator of political hypocrisy, has died at his home in Los Angeles.

Flynt, founder of Hustler Magazine, died Wednesday, his brother told The Washington Post. Flynt was 78.

He had suffered numerous health complications since he was shot and paralyzed in 1978 by a white supremacist as he was arriving for an obscenity trial in Georgia.

Flynt, who ran his publishing business from a Beverly Hills high rise and moved about in an $85,000 gold-plated wheelchair, became an improbable political broker who sought to discredit politicians he believed were hypocrites — the Georgia congressman who opposed abortion yet paid for his wife to undergo the procedure, the former House speaker who’d had extramarital affairs.

His foray into the seamy side of politics began in the late 1990s when Flynt placed a full-page ad in The Washington Post announcing “a cash offer of up to one million dollars” to anyone who could prove having an adulterous sexual encounter with a high-ranking government official or current member of Congress. In 2016, just weeks before the presidential election, he offered an identical bounty to anyone who could produce video or audio recordings of Donald Trump “engaged in illegal activity or in a sexually demeaning or derogatory manner.” There were no collectors on either offer.

The political jousting, the controversial courtroom fights and the efforts to milk outrage at every turn were hallmarks for Flynt, whose quirky, iconoclastic behavior was portrayed in the 1996 movie “The People vs. Larry Flynt.”