Larry Flynt, who has died aged 78, was an American pornographer who picked wild legal fights in his efforts to protect freedom of speech - or to attract publicity for his magazines - and built a business empire of publications, strip clubs and adult shops worth $400m (€330m) in 2015.
Much of his life was spent promoting Hustler, the magazine he founded in 1974. It pioneered a demotic brand of pornography and outsold Playboy and Penthouse. It was not enough for Flynt to shock people with pictorial content. I wanted to offend everyone on an equal-opportunity basis, he boasted.
It was his muck-raking that got Flynt into the greatest trouble. His first visit to the Supreme Court was to appeal against a libel conviction - he had alleged that Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse, had given his girlfriend a venereal disease.
(Feb 11): Larry Flynt, who parlayed a string of striptease bars into a multimillion-dollar pornography empire of magazines, books and videos, and successfully defended the enterprise in a First Amendment case before the U.S. Supreme Court, has died. He was 78.
He died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles, according to the Washington Post, citing his brother Jimmy Flynt. No cause was given.
In 1965, Flynt bought a bar and began setting up Hustler clubs in cities from New York to California. He published the first issue of Hustler magazine in July 1974, following with other publications and decades later turned to the Internet as raunchier digital rivals undercut pornographic periodicals.
Larry Flynt
Portrayed by Woody Harrelson in a 1996 Milos Forman film, he famously beat televangelist Jerry Falwell in a case that went to the Supreme Court.
Larry Flynt, the tenacious, controversial and free-thinking entrepreneur who took a string of strip clubs and built them into Hustler, one of the world s most successful sex-based brands, has died. He was 78.
Flynt died Wednesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles from a sudden illness, according to his manager Minda Gowen.
Flynt changed the face of publishing with
Hustler magazine, an explicitly lewd monthly featuring nude photos and crude, below-the-belt humor. Launched in 1974, it focused on a part of the female anatomy that Flynt felt
Larry Flynt, pornographer, provoker and scabrous champion of Americans’ right to free speech – obituary
After his 1988 Supreme Court win Flynt said: ‘If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me, then it will protect all of you’
Flynt, founder of Hustler magazine, giving a press conference in 2007
Credit: Gus Ruelas/REUTERS
Larry Flynt, who has died aged 78, was an American pornographer who picked wild legal fights in his efforts to protect freedom of speech – or, depending on one’s point of view, to attract publicity for his magazines and himself – and built up a business empire of magazines, strip clubs and “adult” shops estimated to be worth $400 million in 2015.