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LOS ANGELES (AP) – Larry Flynt, who turned his steamy Hustler magazine into an empire while battling numerous First Amendment court battles and skinning politicians with stunts such as a Donald Trump assassination Christmas card , is dead. He was 78 years old.
Flynt, whose health was in decline, died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Wednesday, his longtime lawyer Paul Cambria told The Associated Press.
Flynt was shot dead in an assassination attempt in 1978 and left paralyzed from the waist down, but refused to slow down, building a flamboyant reputation for himself with an estimated fortune of $ 100 million.
He got around in a gold-plated wheelchair with a velvet-lined seat.
“His doctors said he should have died 30 years ago,” his nephew, Jimmy Flynt Jr., said Wednesday. “He outlasted most of the doctors who looked after him.
Born November 1, 1942 in Lakeville, Kentucky, Larry Claxton Flynt Jr. grew up in poverty. Twice divorced at age 21, Flynt eventually found his calling by buying bars and turning them into Hustler clubs that featured topless dancers. In an effort to stimulate business, he published a newsletter which became Hustler magazine.
Founded in 1974, Hustler was unabashedly rude, low-key, and uncompromising, mocking the claims of male magazines as tall as Playboy.
The magazine featured crude and politically incorrect humor, photos of female genitals, and occasionally S&M and bondage scenes with women tied up and gagged. He shocked audiences with a 1978 cover of a woman being fed through a meat grinder.
So it was no shock that Flynt faced many legal battles over obscenity laws or that he was intensely hated by the religious right and feminist groups.
“Larry Flynt must be seen as a bane to society; he directly contributed to and profited from the sexual exploitation of women for most of his career, and our culture is poorer for that, ”said Dawn Hawkins, senior vice president and executive director of the National Center on sexual exploitation, in a statement Wednesday. .
Flynt has maintained throughout his life that he is not only a pornographer, but also a fierce defender of free speech rights.
“My position is that you pay a price to live in a free society, and that the price is the tolerance of certain things that you don’t like,” he once told the Seattle Times. “You have to put up with the Larry Flynts of this world.”
The Supreme Court of the United States has agreed with him at least once, when he won a long and bitter battle with the Reverend Jerry Falwell. The televangelist sued him for libel after a 1983 Hustler liquor commercial suggested that Falwell had lost his virginity to his mother in an addiction.
This affair and much of the rest of Flynt’s life were portrayed in the 1996 film, “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” which drew Oscar nominations for director Milos Forman and for Woody Harrelson, who portrayed Flynt. Flynt made an appearance as a judge.
Flynt owned not only Hustler, but other niche publications, a video production company, dozens of websites, two Los Angeles area casinos, and dozens of Hustler stores selling adult-oriented merchandise.
At the time of his death, he claimed to have video-on-demand operations in more than 55 countries and more than 30 Hustler Hollywood retail stores across the United States.
Its successes were offset by tragedies.
While involved in an obscenity lawsuit in Georgia in 1978, Flynt was shot twice by white supremacist serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin, who said he was angered by a layout of race photos mixed Hustler. Franklin was executed for murder despite opposition from Flynt, who opposed the death penalty.
The shooting left Flynt in relentless pain for many years, causing him to abandon his proclaimed Born Again Christianity and embrace alcohol and pain relievers.
He and his fourth wife, Althea, moved to Los Angeles and spent most of their time behind their mansion’s 5,000-pound steel door. Althea, who became addicted to heroin and contracted the AIDS virus, drowned in their bathtub in 1987 at the age of 33. His death was deemed accidental.
“Althea was the best thing that ever happened to me,” said an inconsolable Flynt at the time.
Flynt’s behavior during these years was extremely erratic. He was removed from the United States Supreme Court after halting proceedings in 1983 by shouting abuse at the judges.
He then appeared in a federal courthouse in Los Angeles wearing a Purple Heart and a diaper made from an American flag.
A sober Flynt finally returned to work, the pain eased by surgery.
He spent his last years in the political arena. When California voters recalled Governor Gray Davis in 2003, Flynt was among 135 candidates to replace him. He campaigned as “a caring coal peddler” and garnered over 15,000 votes.
A self-proclaimed progressive liberal, Flynt was no fan of former President Donald Trump. In 2017, Flynt offered a $ 10 million reward for evidence that would lead to Trump’s impeachment, and in 2019 Larry Flynt Publications sent a Christmas card to some Republican congressmen that showed Trump lying dead in a pond. blood, the killer saying, “I just shot Donald Trump on Fifth Avenue and nobody murdered me. It was a reference to Trump’s bragging about being able to do the same and not losing a vote.
Over the years, it has significantly expanded its business into the internet and the adult film industry, noting the inroads they have made in the sales of its magazines.
“You can see more on cable and satellite today than you can see in what I published in 1974,” Flynt told The Associated Press in 2003.
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This story contains biographical information compiled by former Associated Press writer Greg Risling.
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