Larry Claxton Flynt, Jr. (born November 1, 1942) is
an American publisher and the head of Larry Flynt
Publications (LFP).
LFP mainly produces pornographic videos and magazines, most notably Hustler. The
company has an annual turnover of approximately $150 million. Larry Flynt has had several legal battles involving the
First Amendment, and has run for public office a
number of times. He has bipolar disorder and is paralyzed from the waist down due to
injuries sustained from an assassination attempt.
Biography
Born in Magoffin County, Kentucky, near
Salyersville, to Larry Claxton and Edith (Arnett) Flynt, he spent his childhood
in poverty. Flynt attended public school in
Salyersville but dropped out while in primary school. His mother divorced his
alcoholic father when Flynt was ten, taking Flynt with her to Indiana. Flynt joined the U.S. Army in 1958 at the age of fifteen
but he quit barely a year later. He then joined the Navy in 1959 and served on the
USS Enterprise as a radar operator. Flynt left the Navy in 1964 and began
working in a General Motors factory in Dayton, Ohio. He opened the first Hustler Club, a strip club, in Cincinnati in 1970. Other clubs soon followed in Dayton,
Columbus, Toledo, Akron, and Cleveland. Flynt started his magazine
Hustler in July 1974, later publishing a similar magazine, Chic.
According to Flynt's autobiography, his first sexual experience
was a mistaken encounter with a chicken after he had heard from older boys that sexual intercourse with a chicken was similar in sensation to sexual
intercourse with a woman. He proceeded to have sex with a chicken, killing it afterwards to avoid any suspicion.[1] Flynt was also only nine years old at the time.
Flynt has been married five times; his longest marriage was to his fourth wife, Althea,
from 1976 until her death in 1987. She had been suffering from AIDS and drowned in a bathtub,
possibly as a result of a heroin overdose. He has five
children, as well as numerous illegitimate children from one-night stands over the years.
He had a one-year flirtation with evangelical Christianity, converted by evangelist
Ruth Carter Stapleton (sister of President Jimmy
Carter) in 1977. He continued to publish his magazine, vowing to "hustle for God," became "born again" and claims he had a vision from God while flying his jet.[citation needed]
During a legal battle (see below) related to obscenity in
Gwinnett County, Georgia, on
March 6, 1978, he and his local lawyer Gene Reeves Jr. were shot in an ambush near the county courthouse in Lawrenceville. White supremacist serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin has confessed to the shootings, claiming he was outraged by an interracial photo shoot in Hustler. Franklin, who is currently
serving a life sentence in prison for unrelated murder
charges, was never brought to trial for the attempted
killing. Flynt has made statements indicating he believes Franklin's story, and some
law enforcement officials have the same opinion. There remain skeptics, however, and the issue
may never be resolved. Flynt's injuries left him paralyzed from the waist down, though his lawyer
Reeves recovered more fully. The injury caused Flynt intense, constant pain, and he was addicted to painkillers until multiple surgeries deadened the affected nerves. After the attack, he renounced
Christianity and moved with Althea to a Bel-Air mansion in Los Angeles. He currently resides in Santa
Monica.
He also suffered a stroke caused by one of several overdoses of his painkiller medication; he recovered but has had
pronunciation difficulties since.
Flynt disowned his eldest daughter Tonya Flynt-Vega after she became a Christian anti-pornography activist. In her 1998 book
Hustled, she claims that Flynt sexually abused her as a child.[2] Flynt has denied the charges.
Flynt's enterprises
LFP, Inc. Headquarters in Beverly Hills
Larry Flynt Hustler Club on West 52nd Street in New York
By 1970, together with his brother and life-long business partner Jimmy, he ran eight strip clubs throughout Ohio in
Cincinnati, Toledo, Akron and Cleveland.
In July 1974, Flynt first published Hustler as a step forward from the Hustler
Newsletter which was cheap advertising for his businesses. The magazine struggled for the first year, partly because many
distributors and wholesalers refused to handle it as its nude photos became increasingly graphic. The magazine targeted
working-class men and grew from a shaky start to a peak circulation of around 3 million (current circulation is below 500,000).
In November 1974, it showed the first "pink-shots", photos of open vaginas. The publication of
nude paparazzi pictures of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in August 1975 was a
major fillip. Hustler has often featured more explicit photographs than comparable magazines and
has contained depictions of women that some find demeaning, such as a naked woman in a meat grinder or presented as a dog on a
leash — though Flynt later said that the meat grinder image was a criticism of the pornography industry itself.[citation needed]
Flynt created his privately held company Larry Flynt Publications (LFP) in 1976. LFP published several other magazines.
It also included a distribution business, something that may have angered the Mafia, which
traditionally organized the distribution of porn. LFP did not expand beyond pornography
until 1986, but later its output included more mainstream work. The distribution business as well as several mainstream magazines
were sold beginning in 1996. LFP started to produce pornographic movies in 1998.
On June 22, 2000, Flynt opened the Hustler Casino, a card room located in the Los Angeles
suburb of Gardena. After it opened, many observers in the gaming industry speculated
that, because of his past legal troubles, Flynt might not be able to get a license to operate a card room. This speculation
proved to be wrong when the California Gambling Control Commission confirmed that Flynt is the sole proprietor and gaming
licensee of the Hustler Casino.
Other ventures either wholly owned by or licensed by Flynt or LFP, Inc. include the Hustler Club, a gentlemen's club, and the
Hustler Store, owned by Larry Flynt's brother Jimmy. He also publishes Barely
Legal, a pornographic magazine featuring young women who have recently turned 18, the minimum age for a pornographic
or erotic model.
In 2001, Larry Flynt stated his net worth as $400 million. [1]
In 1994 Flynt bought a Gulfstream II private jet, that jet was used in the
movie The People vs. Larry Flynt. In 2005 he replaced it with a
Gulfstream IV.
Legal battles
Flynt was embroiled in many legal battles regarding the regulation of pornography and
free speech within the United States, especially attacking the Miller v. California (1973) obscenity exception to the
First Amendment. He was first prosecuted on obscenity
and organized crime charges in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1976 at the behest of
Charles H. Keating Jr., who headed a local anti-pornography committee. He was sentenced
to seven to 25 years and served six days; the sentence was overturned on a technicality. One argument resulting from this case
went up to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981.[3]
Outraged by a derogatory cartoon published in Hustler in 1976, Kathy Keeton, then
girlfriend of Penthouse publisher Bob
Guccione, filed a libel suit against Flynt in the state of Ohio. Her lawsuit was eventually dismissed, as she had missed the deadline under the statute of limitations. She then filed a new lawsuit in New
Hampshire, where Hustler's sales were, however, very small. The question of whether she could sue there, regardless
of the minimal sales, reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1983,[4] with Flynt losing the case.
Because of a vulgar outburst by Flynt, this case is occasionally reviewed today in first year law school Civil Procedure courses, due to its implications
regarding personal jurisdiction over a defendant. During the proceedings, Flynt reportedly
shouted "Fuck this court!" and called the justices "nothing but eight assholes and a token cunt" (referring to Justice
Sandra Day O'Connor).[5] Chief Justice Warren E. Burger had him arrested for
contempt of court, but the charge was later dismissed.
Also in 1983, during a trial about his refusal to disclose the source of the John
DeLorean surveillance tapes potentially embarrassing to the FBI,
he wore an American flag as a diaper and was subsequently jailed for six months for
desecration of the flag [2][3]. In the videos, upon arrest, the FBI is shown threatening DeLorean, in effect asking him whether he would
like to choose between defending himself or having "his daugther's head smashed in" [4].
Larry Flynt won an important Supreme Court decision, Hustler Magazine v.
Falwell, in 1988, after having been sued by Jerry Falwell in 1983 over an offensive
ad parody in Hustler that featured Falwell. The ad suggested that Falwell's first sexual encounter was with his mother in
an out-house. Falwell sued Flynt citing emotional distress caused by the ad, but lost in court. The decision clarified that
public figures cannot recover damages for, "intentional infliction of emotional distress" based on parodies.
After the death of Falwell, Larry Flynt stated that, despite their differences, they were able to develop a friendship over
the years, adding that, "I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was
selling."
In April 1998, he was charged in a sting operation with a number of obscenity related
charges concerning the sale of sex videos to a youth in a Cincinnati adult store owned by Flynt. In a plea agreement in 1999 LFP,
Inc. (Flynt's corporate holdings group) pleaded guilty to two counts of pandering
obscenity and agreed to stop selling adult videos in Cincinnati.
In June 2003, prosecutors in Hamilton County, Ohio attempted to revive criminal
charges of pandering obscene material against Flynt and his brother Jimmy, charging that Flynt and his brother had violated the
1999 agreement. Larry Flynt claimed that he no longer had an interest in the Hustler Shops and that prosecutors had no basis for
charging him with pandering obscene material.
Politics
- Flynt's promotion of antiwar causes became a matter of controversy within the Leftist antiwar movement during 2004 and 2005.
In 2004, the antiwar activist group Not In Our Name (NION) publicized Flynt's support
for one of their campaigns, drawing sharp criticism from feminist activist Aura Bogado, who
charged that Leftist leaders were tacitly supporting racism and misogyny by aligning themselves with Flynt. (In addition to NION, Bogado criticized Greg Palast, Amy Goodman, Susie
Bright, and Amy Alkon for what she saw as soft-pedaling of Flynt and Hustler,
working with Larry Flynt and publishing articles in his magazine.) After being attacked in a series of articles and sexual
caricatures in Hustler, Bogado made her criticism public in "Hustling The Left", published on ZNet in June 2005,
and the discussion of her article inspired similar criticism of Leftist leaders cooperating with Flynt by feminists such as
Nikki Craft [5] and pro-feminist Leftists such as Stan Goff ([6]). Shortly after the publication of
her article, the Not in Our Name Steering Committee issued a public apology to Bogado and
objected to the treatment of Bogado in Hustler.
- During the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton in 1998, he offered a
million dollars for evidence about sexual affairs of Republican lawmakers explaining that "desperate times require desperate
measures". He published a magazine about the results, entitled The Flynt Report. His investigations eventually led to the
resignation of incoming House speaker Bob Livingston. He also accused Congressman
Bob Barr of having committed perjury when testifying about Barr's wife's abortion.
- In June of 2007, he placed an ad in the Washington Post offering $1 million for documented stories involving sex with current
congressional members or high-ranking government officials. Some of the earlier revelations Flynt dug up continue to see wide
circulation, including in the upcoming Nation Books release The Brotherhood of the Disappearing Pants: A Field Guide to
Conservative Sex Scandals by Joseph Minton Amann and Tom Breuer.
- Flynt claims to have purchased "fully nude" photographs of Private First Class
Jessica Lynch for $750,000 from soldiers who took the pictures in an Army barracks. Lynch
made headlines as a prisoner of war when US troops freed her from an Iraqi hospital. The media and Defense Department focused on her as a "hero" while others such as Flynt have
claimed she was used for propaganda purposes of the Defense Department and Bush Administration. Despite being opposed to the Bush
White House, Flynt did not release the alleged photographs citing she was a "good kid" who became "a pawn for the government".
"Some things are more important than money," he said. "You gotta do the right thing." Many still question whether he even has
such photos. [8]
Works about Flynt
Flynt has published an autobiography, An Unseemly Man: My Life as a Pornographer, Pundit, and Social Outcast.
A film, The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), was based on his life,
starring Woody Harrelson as Flynt, Courtney Love
as Althea and Edward Norton as Flynt's attorney Alan
Isaacman. Flynt himself made a cameo appearance as an Ohio judge and also a jury member in the court scene of the Jerry
Falwell case. The film was directed by Miloš Forman and co-produced by Oliver Stone.
Footnotes
External links
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