Porn icon Larry Flynt, ‘Hustler’ founder and 1st Amendment champion, dies at 78
(The AEGIS Alliance) – Porn industry icon Larry Flynt, who founded Hustler magazine into an adult leisure empire while championing First Amendment rights, has died on Wednesday, aged 78.
Flynt had been in frail health and died of coronary heart failure at his Hollywood Hills residence, his nephew, Jimmy Flynt Jr. said.
From his beginnings as an Ohio strip club proprietor to his reign as the founding father of probably the most explicit adult-oriented magazines, Flynt continuously challenged the establishment and became a target for religious organizations and feminist groups.
Flynt scored a stunning U.S. Supreme Court victory over the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who had sued him for libel after a 1983 Hustler alcohol advertisement suggested Falwell had lost his virginity to his mom in an outhouse.
Flynt’s company produced not just Hustler, however, but also other niche publications. He owned a video manufacturing company, numerous websites, a Los Angeles-area internet casino, and 10 Hustler boutiques. He additionally licensed the Hustler name to independently owned strip clubs.
His publishing and monetary successes had been offset in equal measure by controversies and tragedies.
Shot by a sniper in 1978, Flynt was paralyzed from the waist down and used a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. He fought battles with drug and alcohol dependency, and his fourth wife died from a heroin overdose.
His daughter, Lisa Flynt-Fugate, died in a 2014 automobile crash in Ohio when she was 47-years-old.
With a fortune estimated at greater than $100 million, Flynt spent his later years in the political environment. When Governor Gray Davis was recalled by California voters in 2003, Flynt was amongst 135 candidates who ran to replace him. He referred to him as “a smut peddler who cares” and gathered more than 15,000 votes.
A self-described progressive, Flynt was no fan of former President Donald Trump. Before the 2016 election, he offered as much as $1 million for video or audio recordings of Trump participating in unlawful or “sexually demeaning or derogatory” activity.
In 2017, Flynt offered a $10 million reward for proof that may result in Trump’s impeachment, and in 2019, Larry Flynt Publications sent a Christmas card to some Republican congressional members that showed Trump lying lifeless in a pool of blood, with the killer saying: “I just shot Donald Trump on Fifth Avenue and no one arrested me,” a reference to Trump’s boast that he might commit such killing and wouldn’t lose voters.
Flynt’s life was depicted in the acclaimed 1996 movie “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” which brought Oscar nominations for director Milos Forman and Woody Harrelson, who played Flynt.
Kyle James Lee – The AEGIS Alliance – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
