Porn Provider Larry Flynt, which turned Hustler magazine into an adult entertainment empire while defending First Amendment rights, died Wednesday. He was 78 years old. A statement from Flynt’s public relations manager said, “He spent peacefully sleeping at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center” with his wife and daughter by his side. Flynt’s nephew said Flynt was in fragile health and died of heart failure.
From his beginnings as the owner of an Ohio strip club to his reign as the founder of one of the most explicit adult magazines, Flynt constantly challenged the establishment and became a target for on the religious right and feminist groups.
Flynt won a stunning U.S. Supreme Court victory over the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who had sued him for defamation after a 1983 Hustler alcohol ad suggested Falwell had lost his mother’s virginity to a house.
Flynt’s company produced not only Hustler, but other niche publications. He owned a video production company, several websites, a casino in the Los Angeles area and 10 Hustler stores. He also licensed the Hustler name to independently owned strip clubs.
In a CBS “Sunday Morning” Profile in 2014, Flynt said that at the height of Hustler’s popularity, the magazine had a monthly circulation of 3 million before the Internet and technology decimated those numbers.
“I treat Hustler the same way it would if it was a jar of peanut butter or a can of green beans,” Flynt told Erin Moriarty of CBS News. “You know, it’s a product, and when you don’t make money, you have to move on.”
Flynt has faced controversy and tragedy over the years.
Shot by a sniper in 1978, Flynt was paralyzed from the waist down and used a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He battled drug and alcohol addiction and his fourth wife died from a heroin overdose.
Her daughter, Lisa Flynt-Fugate, died in a 2014 car accident in Ohio at age 47.
With an estimated fortune of more than $ 100 million, Flynt spent his last years in politics. When California voters recaptured Governor Gray Davis in 2003, Flynt was one of 135 candidates running to replace him. He called himself “a street vendor who cares” and garnered more than 15,000 votes.
Flynt, a self-described progressive, was no fanatic former President Trump. Prior to the 2016 election, he offered to pay up to $ 1 million for video or audio recordings of Mr. Trump engaging in illegal or “sexually degrading or derogatory” activities.
In 2017, Flynt offered a $ 10 million reward for tests that would lead to it The removal of Mr. Trump, and in 2019 Larry Flynt Publications sent a Christmas card to some members of the Republican Congress showing Trump lying dead in a pool of blood, with the killer saying, “I just shot Donald Trump on Fifth Avenue and no one it hasn’t stopped me ”- a reference to Trump’s bragging about being able to commit this assassination and not lose votes.
Flynt’s life was portrayed in the acclaimed 1996 film “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” which earned Oscar nominations for director Milos Forman and Woody Harrelson, who played Flynt.
