Larry Flynt Jr was born on November 1, 1942, in Magoffin County, Kentucky, to Larry and Edith Flynt. His father was an alcoholic and the family lived with him in a state of poverty until Edith divorced him when Larry was ten years old and took Larry Jr to live in Indiana. Larry was not a keen scholar and dropped out of primary school and later joined the army in 1958. His interest in the army was short lived and he left within the year and in 1959 he joined the navy. He remained with the navy until 1964 and then took up employment with General Motors in Ohio.
In 1970 Flynt opened his first Hustler Strip Club in Cincinnati and soon opened a string of Hustler Clubs around the USA. On the strength of the popularity of the clubs, Flynt launched a magazine, Hustler, in 1974. The magazine had a slow start but built up to a 3 million circulation in its heyday and the publication of nude paparazzi pictures of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in August 1975 gave the magazine a huge kick-start.
His magazine became increasingly obscene over the years, so much so that in 1978 during a legal battle related to the obscenity in his magazine, he and his lawyer were shot outside the county courthouse in Lawrenceville, by Joseph Paul Franklin, who confessed to the shootings claiming he was outraged by an interracial photo shoot in Hustler.
However Franklin was never brought to trial for the attempted killing. The shooting left Larry wheelchair bound with paralysis from the waist down while his lawyer recovered from his injuries. Following the shooting and an overdose of painkilling medication Flynt had a stroke which left him with a speech impediment; he also suffers from bipolar disorder.
Flynt married a total of five times, but his final marriage in 1976 to Althea was the longest surviving marriage until she died of aids in 1987. From his five wives he has five children. In 1977 the sister of Jimmy Carter, Ruth Carter, was influential in Flynt’s conversion to evangelical Christianity after which he stated he was publishing his magazine for God and that he had a vision of God while flying his jet plane. As always, no stranger to trouble, 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.
Again in 1983, he was sued by Jerry Falwell over an offensive ad parody of him in Hustler. Falwell cited emotional distress caused by the ad but lost out to a court decision in what was classed as a public figure not having the right to sue for damages for "intentional infliction of emotional distress" based on parodies. As a Democrat, Flynt and his magazines are often seen supporting the party but in 1984 Flynt briefly ran for U.S. President as a Republican against Ronald Reagan.
In 1998 controversy found him once again when he disowned his daughter Tonya after she claimed in her book, Hustled, that Flynt had sexually abused her as a child. He denies the charges. Flynt also publishes the magazine Barely Legal, which features pornographic photographs of young women who have recently turned eighteen, capitalizing on the minimum age for pornographic or erotic modeling being only eighteen. A film, The People vs. Larry Flyt, was based on his life, starring Woody Harrelson as Flynt; Courtney Love as his wife, Althea; and Edward Norton as Flynt's attorney, Alan Isaacman.
In 2001, Larry Flynt announced his net worth to be as much as $400 million.
Among Flynt’s other controversial activities is his claim that he purchased "fully nude" photographs of Jessica Lynch for $750,000 from soldiers who took the pictures of her in an Army barracks before she was captured by Iraqis in 2006 when she was a Private in the U.S. army. Then during President Clinton’s impeachment proceedings 1998, Flynt offered a million dollars for evidence about sexual affairs of Republican lawmakers in an effort to smear the Republican party. More trouble surfaced in April 1998 when Flynt was again to meet with legal problems as a number of obscenity related charges concerning the sale of sex videos to a youth in a Cincinnati adult store were brought against him. Flynt pleaded guilty to two counts of pandering obscenity and agreed to stop selling adult videos in Cincinnati.
In 2007, Flynt was considering publishing his Hustler magazine in Bedford, Indiana featuring farm girls. The photo shooting would supposedly begin near the end of June, though there is no scheduled date for the release of the issue.
He currently resides in Santa Monica.
YUDDY
