Larry Flynt

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Larry Flynt (2009)

Lawrence Claxton "Larry" Flynt, Jr. (born November 1, 1942 in Salyersville , Kentucky , † February 10, 2021 in Los Angeles , California ) was an American publisher , publicist and author . Larry Flynt Publications (LFP) , a publishing house he founded and ran until his death, distributes more than 20 magazines, including the men's magazine Hustler .

Flynt was involved in numerous legal proceedings, in which mainly questions of the regulation of pornographic content or freedom of expression guaranteed in the First Amendment to the US Constitution were heard . In 1978 he was seriously injured in an assassination attempt and then remained paralyzed from the waist down.

Life

Larry Flint (left) with his brother Jimmy in 1977
Larry with his brother laying the foundation stone in 2010

Larry Claxton Flynt Jr. was born in Lakeville in 1942, the eldest of three children to farmer Larry Claxton Flynt and Edith (Arnett) Flynt. After the early death of his sister Judy in 1951 from leukemia , the family broke up. The parents divorced, Larry Flynt grew up with his mother, his brother Jimmy lived with a grandmother.

In 1958, at the age of 15, he entered the Army with a forged birth certificate , which he left after just under a year and switched to the Navy , where he was stationed while serving on the USS Enterprise . In 1964 he left the Navy. He founded a first strip club in Dayton , Ohio with his brother Jimmy Flynt . By 1970, Larry and his brother ran a total of eight strip clubs in Ohio.

From July 1974, the brothers published Hustler Magazine as a qualitatively improved version of the Hustler Newsletter , a free art print advertising sheet for their strip clubs. Flynt aggressively attacked the established magazines Playboy and Penthouse . In the beginning he had to struggle with immense start-up difficulties, as the press wholesalers sometimes refused to sell his magazine due to the increasingly objectionable content. In November 1974, Hustler was the first sex magazine in the USA to show the first "pink shots" or photos of open vulvas . The magazine's target audience was and is working class members . After these initial difficulties, Hustler Magazine had a peak circulation of 3,000,000 copies, with spectacular photos such as the paparazzi nude photos of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis . The 2006 edition was around 500,000.

Since the 1970s, Flynt has repeatedly been involved in legal disputes involving the regulation of pornographic content or questions of freedom of expression . After a trial in Gwinnett County , Georgia on March 6, 1978, Larry Flynt and his attorney Gene Reeves Jr. were shot outside the Lawrenceville courthouse . The shooter was racist Joseph Paul Franklin - he later admitted the shots but was never charged for having been sentenced to life in prison for other murders. Joseph Paul Franklin's justification for the act was that Flynt had published pictures of a couple with different skin colors in an issue of Hustler, and Franklin did not accept this representation of interethnic sexuality . Franklin was sentenced to death for another murder in 1997 and executed in 2013; Flynt spoke out against the execution of Franklin. Flynt was paralyzed from the waist down from the gunshot wounds. Up until the surgical obliteration of the torn nerve tracts, he suffered from severe chronic pain and was dependent on painkillers for years.

A drastic parody of the Baptist television preacher Jerry Falwell in a 1983 edition of Hustler depicting Falwell's "first time" incest with his mother in a toilet block resulted in a psychological harm lawsuit by Falwell. On February 24, 1988, the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of Flynt and the Hustler. The ruling was based on the fact that the first amendment and the freedom of expression guaranteed therein were more important than the supposed damage that public persons would have from psychological stress as a result of parodies. Falwell and Flynt later settled their dispute and debated issues of morality and the interpretation of the first Amendment in front of college students, among other things . On the occasion of Falwell's death in 2007, Flynt confessed in an article for the Los Angeles Times that despite their differences over the years, both had become friends.

Flynt's life was filmed in 1996 by Miloš Forman under the title Larry Flynt - The Naked Truth . The lead role was played by Woody Harrelson , who was nominated for Best Actor for his performance at the 1997 Academy Awards . Flynt himself made a cameo as Judge Morrissey in the film .

Larry Flynt was married five times. The first three marriages ended in divorce. From 1976 until her death he was married to Althea Flynt (nee Leasure ), who helped him build the company. However, she later contracted HIV infection and drowned in the bathtub of her Los Angeles mansion in 1987. From 1998 Flynt was married to Elizabeth Berrios.

He had five children. His daughter Lisa Flynt died in 2014 at the age of 47 from injuries sustained in a car accident. The daughter Tonya Flynt-Vega was disinherited by Flynt after she had become an avowed opponent of pornography and in her 1998 book Hustled had claimed to have been sexually abused by Larry Flynt in her childhood, which Larry Flynt vehemently denied; his daughter had been instrumentalized by religious groups.

Flynt died in Los Angeles in February 2021 at the age of 78.

Fonts

  • Larry Flynt, Kenneth Ross: An Unseemly Man: My Life as Pornographer, Pundit, and Social Outcast (autobiography). Phoenix Books, Beverly Hills, CA, 1996, ISBN 1597775762 .
  • Larry Flynt: Sex, Lies & Politics: The Naked Truth . Kensington Books, New York, 2004, ISBN 978-0758204837 .
  • Larry Flynt, David Eisenbach: One Nation Under Sex: How the Private Lives of Presidents, First Ladies and Their Lovers Changed the Course of American History . Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, ISBN 9780230105034 .

Movies

Web links

Commons : Larry Flynt  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Media: US publisher Larry Flynt is dead. In: zeit.de. February 11, 2021, accessed February 11, 2021 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g Robert D. McFadden: Larry Flynt, Who Built a Porn Empire With Hustler, Dies at 78 . In: New York Times, February 10, 2021.
  3. ^ Founder of the erotic magazine "Hustler" died , deutschlandfunkkultur.de, published and accessed on February 11, 2021.
  4. ^ A b c Larry Flynt: The porn king and the preacher . In: Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2007.
  5. ^ Hustler Magazine, Inc. et al. v. Jerry Falwell, 485 US 46
  6. ↑ Timeline in Flynt car, semi crash in Riverside , whio.com, October 24, 2014
  7. ↑ Larry Flynt . In: usatoday.com of November 9, 2002.
  8. ↑ Neda Ulaby: Larry Flynt, Porn Mogul And 'Hustler' Founder, Dies At 78. In: npr.org. February 10, 2021, accessed February 12, 2021 .
personal data
SURNAME Flynt, Larry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Flynt, Lawrence Claxton (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American publisher, publicist, and author
DATE OF BIRTH November 1, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Salyersville , Kentucky
DATE OF DEATH February 10, 2021
Place of death Los Angeles , California