Larry Flynt, porn industry tycoon …

This Wednesday he died Larry flynt, porn industry tycoon in the United States. According to local chronicles, the “King of Porn” died in his Los Angeles mansion, although the causes of his death are unknown. He was 78 years old.

The tycoon became very popular after founding the pornographic magazine Hustler in 1974, with which he founded an empire in the sex industry in which he experienced all kinds of lawsuits, trials, imprisonment and even a assassination attempt in 1978.

For his part, his life was documented in the film “The People vs. Larry Flynt” (1996), starring Woody Harrelson as the well-known businessman, with whom he won an award nomination. Oscars.

Of humble origins, Flynt opened his first strip club in 1964. It was the first in a series of venues he opened across the United States that strengthened his brand in the dance industry. sex. In 1974 he began publishing his pornographic “magazine”, which quickly reached a circulation of 2 million copies.

The magazine rose to fame after it published footage of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis bathing nude in Greece in 1975, as the contest rejected snapshots obtained by a paparazzi. Later, unlike other publications such as Playboy and Penthouse, Flynt opted for a different, coarser and more explicit way of portraying sex in an effort to bring it closer to working class reality.

“I realized that if we got more explicit, we could get a big chunk of that market. I felt raw sex was what men wanted. And he was right, ”he explained in an interview with the Washington Post. But that lens gave way to a series of sadistic and disturbing images that included gang rapes, mutilations and even the grim photograph of a woman in a meat grinder that sparked international controversy.

Flynt argued that this montage was an implicit criticism of the porn industry, but his explanations and agitated defense of the First Amendment to the US Constitution (free speech) did not spare him from complaints and lawsuits for obscenity. He was even sentenced to prison for contempt. In 1978, upon exiting a trial, the businessman was shot and killed by a serial killer, leaving him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

In the decades that followed, he began producing and distributing pornographic films, opened casinos, and flirted with politics by running for the post of aspiring governor of California in 2003.