![]() Less than a decade later, the Falwell case served as a dramatic linchpin for the 1996 Miloš Forman film that cemented Flynt’s legacy as not just a lowbrow Hugh Hefner, but a player in the centuries-old debate over free speech in America. The court ruled unanimously that Hustler’s parody was protected speech, setting the precedent that for public figures “emotional distress” is an insufficient cause for injury. Jerry Falwell sued the magazine for writing - as part of an obviously parodic “advertisement” - that he had sex with his mother in an outhouse. In Flynt’s most famous case, 1988’s Hustler Magazine v. Hustler Magazine, Inc., established the precedent that a state’s courts held jurisdiction over the publisher of defamatory content distributed in that state, and Hustler was ultimately ordered to pay $2 million in damages to Guccione’s then-girlfriend.) For publishing a derogatory cartoon featuring his business rival, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, Flynt found himself in front of the Supreme Court for the first time, during which he engaged in the aforementioned verbal abuse of the justices while wearing a T-shirt that blared, “F- This Court.” (The court’s opinion in Keeton v. In 1976, he was sentenced potentially to decades in prison for obscenity, but the verdict was overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct. ![]() Hustler’s desire to provoke above all else led to extreme, sometimes surprising results: There was the shameless 1975 publication of paparazzi photos featuring Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sunbathing that helped to make the magazine’s name and then, just months later, a surprisingly humane, full pictorial spread featuring a transgender woman.įlynt’s dedication to button-pushing led him to court - many, many times. Insomuch as Hustler had anything to say about American masculinity, it channeled an adolescent, compulsive obsession with sex and a thirst for taboo-puncturing titillation. Hustler was pitched as the anti- Playboy: crass where Playboy was erudite, self-parodic where Playboy painstakingly constructed its “brand” and the furthest thing imaginable from a “lifestyle” magazine. Out of those clubs, the magazine of the same name was born in 1974 - and, with it, Flynt’s legend and fortune. By the end of that decade, he and his brother Jimmy had opened a string of “Hustler Clubs” across Ohio, featuring live, nude dancers. (In a 1996 memoir, he claimed that, during a later stint in the Navy, he was part of a USS Enterprise crew that retrieved John Glenn’s capsule.) Flynt finally settled on a life as a nightclub operator, purchasing his first bar in 1965 at the age of 23. His early life reads like a picaresque: He bootlegged moonshine, he ran away from home, he used forged documents to enlist in the Army at the age of 15. More than any role as a crusading hero or perverted villain, Flynt is best understood as an expression of pure id in turn, he helped to reveal the extent to which that id is and is not restrained by the rule of law in liberal society.įlynt was born in the early 1940s in eastern Kentucky, into a childhood of poverty, death (his younger sister died at age four) and divorce. ![]() He railed against public prudishness by gleefully exposing the affairs that drove former Rep. The would-be assassin who put Flynt in a wheelchair for the remainder of his life in 1978 was not an aggrieved feminist or religious radical, but a white supremacist angered by Hustler’s depiction of interracial sex. He was a dogged antagonist of the evangelical church who nonetheless counted Ruth Carter Stapleton, the sister of former President Jimmy Carter, as a close friend for a time. The reality of Flynt’s accomplishment is far more complicated than that myth and not just because of his personal failings.
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