Larry Flynt

Flynt was born in Lakeville, Magoffin County, Kentucky, the first of three children of Larry Claxton Flynt Sr., a sharecropper, and Edith (née Arnett), a homemaker. He had two younger siblings: sister Judy and brother Jimmy Ray Flynt. His father served in the United States Army in the European theatre of World War II. Due to his father's absence, Flynt was raised solely by his mother and maternal grandmother for the first three years of his life. Flynt was raised in poverty, and said Magoffin County was the poorest county in the nation during the Great Depression. In 1951, Flynt's sister, Judy, died of leukemia at age four. The death provoked his parents' divorce one year later; Flynt was then raised by his mother in Hamlet, Indiana, and his brother, Jimmy, was raised by his maternal grandmother in Magoffin County. Two years later, Flynt returned to live in Magoffin County with his father because he disliked his mother's new boyfriend.

Flynt attended Salyersville High School (now Magoffin County High School) in the ninth grade. However, he ran away from home and, despite being only 15 years old, joined the United States Army using a counterfeit birth certificate. It was around that time that he developed a passion for the game of poker. After being honorably discharged, Flynt returned to his mother in Indiana and found employment at the Inland Manufacturing Company, an affiliate of General Motors. However, there was a union-led slowdown and he was laid off after only three months. He then returned to his father in Kentucky. For a brief period, he became a bootlegger but stopped when he learned that county deputies were searching for him. After living on his savings for two months, he enlisted in the United States Navy in July 1960. He became a radar operator on USS Enterprise. He was the operator on duty when the ship was assigned to recover John Glenn's space capsule. He was honorably discharged in July 1964.

Flynt was married five times; his wives were:

Mary Flynt (1961–1965)

Peggy Mathis (1966–1969)

Kathy Barr (1970–1975)

Althea Leasure (1976–1987)

Elizabeth Berrios (1998–2021)

He married his fourth wife, Althea, in 1976, and they remained married for eleven years until her death at age 33. Larry reported she had ARC (AIDS-related complex), but drowned in a bathtub in 1987. Toxicology reports were inconclusive. He married his fifth wife, Elizabeth Berrios, in 1998. Flynt had four daughters and a son, as well as many grandchildren. His daughter Lisa Flynt-Fugate died in a car crash in Ohio in October 2014 at age 47.

He said he was an evangelical Christian for one year, "converted" in 1977 by evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton, the sister of Jimmy Carter. He said he became "born again" and that he had a vision from God while flying with Stapleton in his jet. He continued to publish his magazine, however, vowing to "hustle for God". He later declared himself an atheist.

Flynt said he had bipolar disorder.

Flynt died from heart failure in Los Angeles on February 10, 2021, at age 78.

Flynt was a Democrat when Bill Clinton was president. In 2013, he said he was "a civil libertarian to the core", though he once attempted a presidential run as a Republican in 1984. He was a staunch critic of the Warren Commission and offered $1 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the assassin of John F. Kennedy. In 2003, Flynt was a candidate in the recall election of California governor Gray Davis, calling himself a "smut peddler who cares". He finished seventh in a field of 135 candidates with 17,458 votes (0.2%).

Flynt repeatedly weighed in on public debates by trying to expose conservative or Republican politicians with sexual scandals. He did so during the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton in 1998, offering $1 million for evidence and publishing the results in The Flynt Report. These publications led to the resignation of incoming House Speaker Bob Livingston. In 2007, Flynt repeated his $1 million offer and also wrote the foreword to Joseph Minton Amann and Tom Breuer's The Brotherhood of Disappearing Pants: A field guide to conservative sex scandals, which contained some cases published by Flynt.

In 2003, Flynt purchased nude photographs of former PFC Jessica Lynch, who was captured by Iraqi forces, rescued from an Iraqi hospital by U.S. troops and celebrated as a hero by the media. He said he would never show any of the photographs, calling Lynch a "good kid" who became "a pawn for the government". Flynt supported activist groups opposed to the war in Iraq in 2004 and 2005. He was a strong supporter of LGBT rights and same-sex marriage.

In 2012, Flynt offered a $1 million reward for information on Mitt Romney's unreleased tax returns and ran two full-page ads in USA Today and The Washington Post to promote the offer.

Flynt endorsed Mark Sanford in the 2013 special election for South Carolina's 1st congressional district, saying "His open embrace of his mistress in the name of love, breaking his sacred marriage vows, was an act of bravery that has drawn my support."

In January 2015, following the attack on Charlie Hebdo, Flynt criticized the American media for refusing to broadcast the caricatures of Mohammed from the satirical weekly.

In May 2015, Flynt endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. In an interview with Marfa Journal later that year, he described his political views as "progressively liberal".

In October 2017, Flynt offered a $10 million reward for any evidence that would lead to the impeachment of President Donald Trump. A 2019 Christmas card from Larry Flynt Publications, sent to several Republican congressmen, depicted Trump's assassination.

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 in 1976 by Simon Leis, who headed a local anti-pornography committee. He was given a sentence of 7–25 years in prison, but served only six days in jail; the sentence was overturned on appeal following allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, as well as judicial and jury bias. One argument resulting from this case was reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981. Flynt made an appearance in a feature film based on the trial, The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), playing the judge who sentenced him in the case.

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 Ohio. Her lawsuit was dismissed because she had missed the deadline under the statute of limitations. She then filed a new lawsuit in New Hampshire, where Hustler's sales were very small. The question of whether she could sue there reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1983, with Flynt losing the case. 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 in Keeton v. Hustler Magazine, Flynt shouted "Fuck this court!" and called the justices "nine assholes and one token cunt" (referring to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor). Chief Justice Warren E. Burger had him arrested for contempt of court, but the charge was later dismissed.

Also in 1983, he leaked an FBI surveillance tape to the media regarding John DeLorean. In the videos, when arresting DeLorean, the FBI is shown asking him whether he would rather defend himself or have "his daughter's head smashed in". During the subsequent trial, Flynt wore a U.S. flag as a diaper and was jailed for six months for desecration of the flag.

In 1988, Flynt won a Supreme Court decision, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, after being sued by Reverend Jerry Falwell in 1983, over an offensive ad parody in Hustler that suggested that Falwell's first sexual encounter was with his mother in an outhouse. Falwell sued Flynt, citing "emotional distress" caused by the ad. The decision clarified that public figures cannot recover damages for "intentional infliction of emotional distress" based on parodies. After Falwell's death, Flynt said despite their differences, he and Falwell had become friends over the years, adding, "I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling."

As a result of a sting operation in April 1998, Flynt was charged with a number of obscenity-related offenses concerning the sale of sex videos to a youth in a Cincinnati adult store he owned. 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 Flynt, charging that they had violated the 1999 agreement. Flynt said that he no longer had an interest in the Hustler Shops and that prosecutors had no basis for the lawsuit.

In January 2009, Flynt filed suit against two nephews, Jimmy Flynt II and Dustin Flynt, for the use of his family name in producing pornography. He regarded their pornography to be inferior. He prevailed on the main trademark infringement issue, but lost on invasion of privacy claims.

In May 2021, Vice News published Flynt's 322-page FBI file, which the outlet obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. It contained details of his 1983 arrest for disrupting the U.S. Supreme Court during the Keeton hearing and the unconfirmed claim of a confidential informant that Flynt had asked mercenary Mitchell WerBell III to rig his wheelchair with C-4 explosives so he could blow himself up during that same hearing, taking all of the justices with him.