"[A]n unpopular hero to civil libertarians, the Devil incarnate to an unlikely alliance of feminists and morality preachers, a conundrum to judges and juries..."

"... and a purveyor of guilty secrets to legions of men slinking off from porn shops or the mailbox with brown paper parcels."

"Larry Flynt, Who Built a Porn Empire With Hustler, Dies at 78" (NYT). 

Hustler’s June 1978 cover caught the enigmas of a magazine that was at once salacious, satirical, perverse, decadent, gleefully immoral and hypocritical. It portrayed a woman upside down and half gone into a meat grinder, with a plate of hamburger below. A “seal of approval” noted: “Prime. Last All Meat Issue. Grade ‘A’ Pink.” A caption quoted Mr. Flynt, “We will no longer hang women up like pieces of meat.”... 

[T]he feminist Gloria Steinem wrote a scathing denunciation on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. “A pornographer is not a hero,” she said. “Hustler is depicted as tacky at worst, and maybe even honest for showing full nudity. What’s left out are the magazine’s images of women being beaten, tortured and raped, women subject to degradations from bestiality to sexual slavery.” 

The images featured in Hustler were certainly graphic and often violent: Women were depicted crawling at the end of a dog leash, nailed to a cross, bagged like a deer and bound to a luggage rack. One cover showed a woman’s head in a gift box.... 

A 1983 study financed by the Justice Department and conducted by Judith Reisman, the conservative author and academic, found that thousands of cartoons in Hustler, as well as its competitors Playboy and Penthouse, depicted rape, botched abortions and children in sexual poses. “Chester the Molester,” a long-running Hustler cartoon feature about a pedophile, was denounced by many critics, but Mr. Flynt defended it as bawdy social satire.... After being approached in 1977 by the evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton, President Jimmy Carter’s sister, Mr. Flynt announced that he had become a born-again Christian, saying he had had a vision of God while airborne in his jet with Ms. Stapleton. He banned smoking at Hustler, gave the staff a raise, began a carrot juice diet and vowed to “hustle for God.” But he soon resumed his ventures and vices, calling himself an atheist.

Much more at the link — the court cases, the First Amendment victories, the gruesome shooting, the movie Milos Forman made about him, the 5 wives, the success in business despite a lack of education. I'll just add the quote from his lawyer, Herald Price Fahringer , that I blogged when the lawyer died 6 years ago:

"Freedom is only meaningful if it includes all speech, no matter who is offended by it. It would be a hazardous undertaking for anyone to start separating the permissible speech from the impermissible, using the standard of offensiveness. The freedom guaranteed in the First Amendment is indivisible. You can’t take it away from Larry Flynt and keep it for yourself. The real issue of this case is: Are we afraid to be free?"

It's a lot easier to answer that question now, unfortunately: Yes, we are afraid to be free.