He was paralyzed from the waist down due to injuries sustained in a 1978 attempted assassination by serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin.

After being honorably discharged, Flynt returned to his mother in Indiana and found employment at the Inland Manufacturing Company, an affiliate of General Motors.

[1]: 56 Flynt decided to open a new, higher-class bar, which would also be the first in the area to feature nude hostess dancers; he named it the Hustler Club.

From 1968 onward, with the help of his brother Jimmy and later his girlfriend Althea Leasure, he opened Hustler Clubs in Akron, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Toledo, Ohio.

[1]: 88, 95  Flynt's friend Al Goldstein said that Hustler took its inspiration from his own tabloid Screw, but credited his comrade-in-arms with accomplishing what he had not: creating a national publication.

Shortly thereafter, Flynt was approached by a paparazzo who had taken pictures of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis while she was sunbathing nude on vacation in 1971.

On March 6, 1978, during a legal battle related to obscenity in Gwinnett County, Georgia, Flynt and his lawyer were shot on the sidewalk in Lawrenceville by Joseph Paul Franklin.

[13] Flynt's injuries caused him constant, excruciating pain, and he was addicted to painkillers until multiple surgeries deadened the affected nerves.

Franklin, a militant white supremacist and serial killer, also shot Vernon Jordan; he targeted other black and Jewish people in a killing spree from 1977 to 1980.

"[15] Flynt himself suspected the attack was part of a larger conspiracy involving ultra-right elements surrounding U.S. Representative Larry McDonald also behind the Karen Silkwood case with ties to the Intelligence Community and that Franklin may have been subject to MKULTRA-style mind control.

In 2014, Flynt said his print portfolio made up only 10% of his company's revenue, and predicted the demise of Hustler due to competition from the Internet.

[30] On June 22, 2000, Flynt opened the Hustler Casino, a card room located in the Los Angeles suburb of Gardena.

LFP also publishes Barely Legal, a pornographic magazine featuring young women who reportedly have recently turned 18, the minimum age for a person to appear in pornography in the US.

Flynt was embroiled in many legal battles regarding the regulation of pornography and free speech within the United States, especially attacking the Miller v. California (1973) obscenity exception to the First Amendment.

[33] This case is occasionally reviewed today in first-year law school Civil Procedure courses, due to its implications regarding personal jurisdiction over a defendant.

"[38] As a result of a sting operation in April 1998, Flynt was charged with a number of obscenity-related offenses concerning the sale of sex videos to a youth in a Cincinnati adult store he owned.

In a plea agreement in 1999, LFP, Inc. (Flynt's corporate holdings group) pleaded guilty to two counts of pandering obscenity and agreed to stop selling adult videos in Cincinnati.

[40] In May 2021, VICE News published and reported on a copy of Flynt's 322-page FBI file, which the outlet obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

[43] He was a staunch critic of the Warren Commission and offered $1 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the assassin of John F. Kennedy.

[47] Flynt endorsed Mark Sanford in the 2013 special election for South Carolina's 1st congressional district, saying "His open embrace of his mistress in the name of love, breaking his sacred marriage vows, was an act of bravery that has drawn my support.

"[48] In January 2015, following the attack on Charlie Hebdo, Flynt criticized the American media for refusing to broadcast the caricatures of Mohammed from the satirical weekly.

[65] Flynt claims he did not ask Tinsley about the conviction and "Chester the Molester" cartoons drawn while in prison continued to appear in Hustler.

A photo pictorial titled "The naked and the dead", depicted an imprisoned woman being forcibly shaved, sexually assaulted, raped, and electrocuted.

Flynt created a fake postcard featuring a naked woman on a pool table with the caption, "Greetings from New Bedford, Massachusetts, the Portuguese gang-rape capital of America.

Steinem also addressed what she saw as the hypocrisy of him being regarded as a protector of everyone's free speech, noting "other feminists and I have been attacked in Hustler for using our First Amendment rights to protest pornography.

Forman, whose parents were victims of the Nazis,[70] said he made the movie "out of admiration for the beauty and wisdom of the American Constitution, which allows this country to rise to its best when provoked by the worst".

Entertainment Weekly noted the "magazine's racist and anti-Semitic overtones – one Hustler cartoon showed a black man reaching for a watermelon on a giant mousetrap – is also nowhere to be found.

"[74] He defended himself against allegations of misogyny, stating that he supported abortion rights, same-sex marriage and equality, while at the same time offering harsh assessments of his feminist critics and embracing the magazine's crude, sometimes bigoted depictions.

[75] Feminist author Laura Kipnis compared Flynt to the ribald, French Renaissance satirist Rabelais, saying that she saw Hustler "as really dedicated to violating the proprieties that uphold class distinctions", and calling it "one of the most class-antagonistic publications in the country".

[78] In January 2019, Flynt discussed the importance of freedom and voting in America when he was interviewed by Weekly Alibi's August March.