American publisher and founder of a porno magazine, Hustler, in 1973. He also founded Busty Beauties and Barely Legal, all of which featured models with frontal nudity and genital shots. Flynt is a nightmare version of the American dream come true, the epitome of vulgarity and lack of principles, white trash with money. An unabashed redneck and deep-fried hillbilly, he was a high school dropout. Flynt ran go-go clubs, and in the mid-’60s, began publishing a two page newsletter, Hustler. After three prior marriages and four kids, he and his fourth wife, Althea, a former go-go dancer, pursued their bawdy dreams and built up a publishing empire worth millions. They lived a lifestyle of drugs, sex and dissipation. He once confessed to having sex with a chicken, along with many other obscene adventures and bar fights.
On 20 March 1978, Flynt was shot by a sniper and paralyzed from the waist down. He became a “born again” Christian through religious mentor Ruth Carter Stapleton in 1977, until he fell by the wayside of sin as a backslider. He lived a bitter life in a gold-plated wheel chair in an eight-bedroom mansion in Hollywood. Althea died on 27 June 1987; she was found in the bathtub and had AIDS.
A major film release The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), told his story. Flynt’s autobiography was published in December 1996, An Unseemly Man.
On 20 June 1998, he married his longtime companion and former nurse, Elizabeth Berrios, 38, from his wheelchair. It was his fifth marriage and her first. Of his three daughters, Tonya Flynt-Vega traveled the country speaking out against pornography in the late ’90s, claiming that her dad sexually abused her from the time she was 9 to 18.
On 8 August 2003, the self-proclaimed “smut peddler” threw his hat in the ring of the California gubernatorial race, and lost. He was a strong supporter of LGBT rights and same-sex marriage.
Flynt had five daughters and a son. He died from heart failure in Los Angeles on 10 February 2021 at the age of 78.
Link to Wikipedia biography