RN
Larry Flynt died of heart failure at his home in the Hollywood Hills on 10 February 2021. He was 78. What follows is an attempt to get the legal history right, because the version of this piece published at the time did not, and the errors were not small ones.
The case he was not in
The original article stated that Flynt's first and most notorious legal fight was Miller v. California in 1973, and that it ended in a seven-year obscenity sentence.
Miller v. California was not Flynt's case. It was brought against Marvin Miller, and it produced the three-part test that American courts have used ever since to decide whether material is legally obscene. That test is the reason Flynt's later prosecutions were possible — but he was not a party, and conflating the two collapses the framework with the man tried under it.
His actual conviction came in Cincinnati. Prosecuted in Hamilton County by prosecutor Simon Leis on charges of pandering obscenity and engaging in organised crime, Flynt was sentenced to seven to twenty-five years. He served six days. The sentence was overturned, and he prevailed on appeal.
The original also concluded that obscenity law is now treated as unconstitutionally vague and effectively unenforced. That is not the position. Obscenity remains a category of speech outside First Amendment protection, and the Miller test remains good law. Federal and state prosecutions became infrequent, which is a fact about prosecutorial priorities, not about the statutes. The distinction matters to anyone who might rely on the claim.
Lawrenceville, 1978
On 6 March 1978, during an obscenity trial in Lawrenceville, Georgia, Flynt and his attorney Gene Reeves Jr were shot outside the Gwinnett County courthouse as they returned from the lunch recess. Both survived. Flynt was paralysed from the waist down and used a wheelchair for the remaining forty-three years of his life.
The gunman was Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist and serial killer, who said he had been provoked by a photo spread in the magazine featuring an interracial couple. It is worth stating that plainly: the defining physical fact of Flynt's later life was the result of a racially motivated attack, not of the obscenity fight he was in court for that morning.
There is a coda that the original article omitted entirely. When Franklin faced execution in Missouri in 2013, Flynt publicly opposed it. He had spent thirty-five years in a wheelchair because of the man and argued against the state killing him regardless.
The case that actually matters
In 1983 Hustler ran a parody advertisement presenting the Reverend Jerry Falwell Sr as a drunk and a hypocrite, carrying a note that it was not to be taken seriously. Falwell sued for libel, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
The original article gave this a couple of paragraphs, dated it 1983, called it a libel case, and moved on. It was the most consequential thing Flynt was ever involved in, and he won it.
The jury rejected the libel claim, on the grounds that no reasonable reader could have understood the parody as asserting facts about Falwell. But the district court let the emotional distress claim stand and awarded Falwell $200,000 — which meant a publisher could be made to pay for a parody precisely because nobody believed it, so long as it caused sufficient offence.
On 24 February 1988 the Supreme Court reversed, unanimously, in an opinion by Chief Justice Rehnquist. Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46, held that a public figure cannot recover damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress arising from a parody that cannot reasonably be taken as stating actual facts — even where the parody was intended to wound.
The reach of that ruling extends far past the magazine that occasioned it. Every editorial cartoonist, sketch show and satirical column operating in the United States works inside the protection established in a case brought over a Hustler ad parody. That a unanimous Court, led by one of its more conservative Chief Justices, sided with Flynt is the detail that tells you the decision was about the principle rather than the publisher.
What is not repeated here
Several things in the original version have been left out on purpose.
It asserted a psychiatric diagnosis about Flynt in an aside. That was not sourced then and is not verified here, and a medical claim about a named person needs better than a parenthesis.
It included a passage speculating about the private conduct of a living relative of Falwell's. That was gossip about someone who is not the subject of the article, and it is gone.
The magazine ran a long-standing comic strip built around a character who preyed on children. The original mentioned it and then argued it was only comedy and shouldn't be taken seriously. This article notes that the strip ran and attracted sustained condemnation, does not adopt that defence, and does not go further because the surrounding claims were not verified.
The assessment
Flynt is a genuinely difficult figure to write about, and the difficulty is not resolved by picking a side. He published material that a great many people found degrading, including people with no objection to pornography as such. He also, repeatedly and at enormous personal cost, forced American courts to say out loud where the limits of state power over publication actually lie — and the answers they gave protect speech having nothing to do with his magazine.
Both of those are true at once. An obituary that reports only the first is incomplete; one that reports only the second, as the original largely did, is a press release. The law he made is checkable, and getting it right seemed the more useful tribute.