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 Flynt, suffering from a variety
of health problems since a 1978 assassination
attempt that left him a paraplegic, died "from
the recent onset of a sudden illness," according
to Minda Gowen, spokeswoman for Larry Flynt
Publications, which runs the adult entertainment
business he founded.
Flynt died in his sleep at Cedars-Sinai Medical
Center in Los Angeles, with his wife, Liz, and
daughter, Theresa, at his bedside, Gowen said in
a statement.
Celebrated by some as a free-speech provocateur
and reviled by others as a profiteer of sexual
exploitation and misogyny, Flynt was renowned
for taunting critics with such outlandish stunts
as appearing in court wearing a diaper made from
an American flag.
In the most famous of numerous legal battles in
which he was embroiled, the U.S. Supreme Court
rendered a landmark ruling in favor of Flynt in
a libel lawsuit brought against him by
evangelist Jerry Falwell.
Flynt had published a fake ad in Hustler which
depicted Falwell saying his first sexual
encounter had been with his mother in an
outhouse. Falwell sued for $50 million and won a
lower-court ruling, but in 1988 the Supreme
Court held that the ad was a parody and
protected by the First Amendment.
In his heyday, Flynt lived a lifestyle that
could have made Caligula blush. He wrote in his
autobiography that his first sexual experience
was with a chicken and told of having sex every
four or five hours during a workday. After he
was paralyzed, Flynt had penile implant surgery
so he could continue to have sex.
Flynt created a business with an estimated
turnover of $150 million at one point. As
magazine circulation slipped, he stayed ahead of
trends by investing in adult-oriented television
channels, a casino, film distribution and
merchandise.
He said he never objected to being labeled a
smut peddler as long as he was considered a
First Amendment crusader, too.
"Just because I publish pornography does not
mean that I am not concerned about the social
ills that all of us are," he once told an
interviewer.
His detractors saw Flynt as anything but a hero.
"Larry Flynt should be remembered as a scourge
on society," Dawn Hawkins, executive director of
the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. "He
directly contributed to and profited from the
sexual exploitation of women for the majority of
his career, and our culture is poorer for it."
Flynt was often in legal trouble, fighting
obscenity charges or lawsuits, and he often
turned courtroom appearances into spectacles.
His profane outbursts once prompted his own
lawyer to ask a judge to have Flynt bound and
gagged.
EXPLICIT PICS
Born in 1942, Flynt grew up in poverty in
Kentucky and Indiana and dropped out of school
after the eighth grade. Following stints in the
armed forces and a General Motors plant, he and
his brother opened the Hustler Club in Dayton,
Ohio, in 1968. By 1973 it had grown into a
string of strip clubs across the state, and
Flynt published a newsletter to promote them.
That newsletter evolved into Hustler magazine,
his flagship publication, which came to be
infamous for featuring explicit photos that made
competitor Playboy seem mild by comparison.
Virtually nothing was off limits on Hustler's
pages, and Flynt made a point of publishing
photos of women's genitalia.
[to top of second column]
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 At its peak, Hustler reportedly
had a circulation of 3 million. Larry Flynt
Publications also put out other porn magazines,
as well as movies and mainstream magazines.
Flynt reveled in controversy. He made news by
publishing pictures of a nude Jacqueline Kennedy
Onassis sunbathing in 1975 and a cover image of
a naked woman being fed head first into a meat
grinder. In 1998 he offered $1 million to anyone
who could catch high-ranking U.S. government
officials in a sex scandal. "My
competitors always masqueraded their pornography
as art," Flynt told the Cincinnati Post. "We
never had any pretensions about what we did ...
We have proved that barnyard humor has a market
appeal."
He was convicted in 1977 in Cincinnati on
obscenity and organized crime charges, but the
verdict was overturned.
In 1978 Flynt was standing trial on similar
charges in Lawrenceville, Georgia, when he and
his attorney were shot. Joseph Paul Franklin, a
white supremacist, later confessed to the
shootings, saying he was upset by Hustler's
photographs of interracial sex, but was never
prosecuted.
Flynt was left paralyzed from the waist down by
the shooting, restricted to a $17,000
gold-plated wheelchair for the rest of his life.
In October 2013, one month before Franklin was
executed in Missouri for racially motivated
murders not related to the Flynt shooting, Flynt
wrote in the Hollywood Reporter that he did not
believe in the death penalty and did not want
Franklin put to death. He did want vengeance,
however.
"I would love an hour in a room with him and a
pair of wire-cutters and pliers so I could
inflict the same damage on him that he inflicted
on me," Flynt said.
His life was the basis of the 1996 movie "The
People vs. Larry Flynt," starring Woody
Harrelson and focused in part on Flynt's Supreme
Court case.
Labeling himself as a "smut peddler who cares,"
Flynt launched longshot bids for president in
1984 and for California governor in 2003.
In 1977, he converted to evangelical
Christianity at the urging of Ruth Carter
Stapleton, sister of then-President Jimmy
Carter, but renounced those beliefs the
following year after the Georgia shooting.
Flynt's 1996 autobiography was titled "An
Unseemly Man: My Life as a Pornographer, Pundit
and Social Outcast."
He was married five times and had four surviving
children.
(Reporting by Lisa Richwine and Steve Gorman in
Los Angeles; Writing by Eric Walsh; Editing by
Bill Trott and Rosalba O'Brien)
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