Larry Flynt

Larry Flynt was born on November 1, 1942 in Lakeville, Kentucky, the first of three children of a sharecropper and a homemaker, and grew up in extreme poverty during the Great Depression. He ran away from home at fifteen and enlisted in the U.S. Army using a fake birth certificate, later serving as a radar operator on the USS Enterprise during the early 1960s. After his discharge he invested $1,800 to purchase his mother’s bar in Dayton, Ohio, eventually opening the Hustler Club, a venue that featured nude hostess dancers and served as the seed for his later publishing empire. In 1972 he launched the Hustler Newsletter, which quickly evolved into the nationally distributed Hustler magazine, a publication notorious for its explicit photographs, including the infamous 1975 Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis nude spread that sold a million copies in days. Flynt’s aggressive defense of First Amendment rights led to a series of landmark Supreme Court cases, most notably Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (1988), which reinforced protection for satirical speech about public figures. On March 6, 1978, he survived an assassination attempt by white‑supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin, an attack that left him paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. Despite his disability, he expanded his business into television, video, and even a Hustler casino, while continuing to launch political campaigns and offer cash rewards for evidence of misconduct by politicians. His personal life was turbulent, encompassing five marriages—Mary Flynt, Peggy Mathis, Kathy Barr, Althea Leasure, and Elizabeth Berrios—and five children, some of whom later accused him of abuse. Flynt remained a vocal civil libertarian and Democratic supporter until his death from heart failure on February 10, 2021, in Los Angeles, leaving behind a controversial legacy that intertwines free‑speech advocacy with the exploitation debates surrounding adult entertainment.