Larry Flynt’s continuing crusade

Larry Flynt wants to be remembered as more than just a common pornographer, said Stephen Galloway in The Hollywood Reporter. The multimillionaire, now 70, presides over an empire of adult TV channels, a movie distribution company, clubs, a casino, and 1,500 employees, but what he’s proudest of is his victory over televangelist Jerry Falwell in the U.S. Supreme Court 25 years ago. “I have done more for the First Amendment than the rest of those yokels put together,” the Hustler publisher says of industry rivals like Hugh Hefner. Falwell sued Hustler for libel in 1988 over a cartoon implying he’d had sexual relations with his mother. The Supreme Court sided with Flynt, ruling that satire and parody are constitutionally protected. Falwell had no hard feelings about the case, says Flynt, and the two later staged a series of public debates. “Falwell was a salesman,” he says. “You know, if he’d been selling peanut butter or beer, he would’ve sold it the same way he sold his religion.” Flynt still considers himself a crusader against Puritanism and hypocrisy, and says he has spent the last two years trying to dig up evidence to expose a closeted homosexual Republican congressman. “We’re having trouble pinning him down,” he says, “but this is one guy I’d really like to get.”

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