The Attempted Murder Of Hustler Founder, Larry Flynt
- Danny Dutch
- Jun 17
- 8 min read
In the 1970s, Lawrenceville, Georgia, was hardly the sort of place you’d expect to see splashed across national headlines. It sat about thirty miles out from Atlanta — close enough for commuters, quiet enough for farmers, and just starting to feel the tug of rapid suburban growth. Some folks worked the land, while plenty drove in for shifts at the big General Motors Assembly Plant or Western Electric, which made the heavy-duty phone cables that linked whole continents together.
Back then, Gwinnett County, with Lawrenceville at its heart, was on the brink of exploding in size. But for all its growth, it was very much a conservative corner of the South — a dry county where you could grab a beer or a glass of wine but would be hard pressed to find proper liquor, unless you headed over to Lilburn. Churches dotted nearly every street, and Sundays were still sacred enough to keep most shops closed.
Keeping Things “Nice and Clean”
So it made sense, in a way, that local leaders took pride in guarding the county’s sense of decency. Gwinnett County Solicitor Gary Davis took the lead. When a poll from his office showed that the locals were sick of smut, he went public with a promise: “This is a nice, clean county, and we intend to keep it that way.”
Not that Gwinnett was alone, counties all around Atlanta were cracking down too. Across Fulton, Clayton, and DeKalb, officials were dusting off old obscenity laws and threatening to make examples of anyone who pushed the line. Naturally, if you were hunting for a big fish to fry in the court of public opinion, Larry Flynt was practically baiting you.
Flynt: From Nowhere to Hustler
Larry Flynt was never the type to back down from a fight. He’d grown up poor in Magoffin County, Kentucky, the kind of place where most families barely scraped by. He bailed at fifteen, lied about his age, joined the Army, then switched over to the Navy before eventually coming home with an honourable discharge and a head full of ideas.
First, he bought the Keewee bar in Dayton, Ohio, from his own mother, turned a quick profit, and used that to buy a couple more watering holes. But just selling drinks got dull, so Flynt made a leap: topless dancing. He opened the first Hustler Club, an instant hit, and soon there were Hustler Clubs all over Ohio.
Then he got into print. He tried his hand at a small paper called Bachelor’s Beat, sold it off, then printed up a raunchy newsletter to drum up business for the clubs. By 1974, that newsletter had grown into Hustler Magazine, and Flynt was off to the races.
Distribution was tricky at first. Plenty of people hated the idea of his magazine on the shelves. But everything changed when a photographer handed him gold on a silver plate: paparazzi snaps of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sunbathing nude while holidaying abroad. They’d appeared in an obscure Italian mag called Playmen, but Flynt snapped up the rights for $18,000 and slapped them on his August 1975 cover. In one shot, circulation shot from a few thousand to over two million.
Trials, Scandals, and a Young Jerry Springer
Pretty soon, Flynt was a walking magnet for prosecutors wanting to look tough on vice. Ohio went first. In 1977, Flynt was hauled into court for obscenity charges and got hit with a seven-to-twenty-five year sentence. A young Cincinnati city councillor, Jerry Springer — yes, that Jerry Springer — summed it up later: “a fascinating spectacle” and “great theatre.” Flynt only spent six days behind bars before his legal team got him out on appeal — and the conviction was tossed not long after.
Still, Flynt didn’t just slink away. He set his sights on Georgia next. In 1977, he rolled into Atlanta determined to test what the First Amendment really protected down South. He rented a shop, sold Hustler right out in the open, and even offered to buy Atlanta Magazine just for good measure. Local authorities bit the bait. Around that time, Flynt also had a spiritual twist: thanks to President Carter’s sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton, he claimed a fresh Christian conversion.
In the end, it was Gwinnett County — not Fulton — that won the race to drag Flynt into court. He tangled up Fulton’s charges in federal court, so Gwinnett lined up its shot. In March 1978, Flynt was back in court, this time at the old courthouse in Lawrenceville, facing obscenity charges.
Meet the Prosecutor: Bryant Huff
Bryant Huff, Gwinnett’s District Attorney, was nobody’s pushover. Over the years, he’d built a name chasing crooks big and small. He helped bust Sheriff Dan Cole for moonshining in the 1960s, saw through the conviction of Troy Lee Gregg — whose case helped revive the death penalty — and nailed down a death sentence for David Jarrell in a brutal murder and kidnapping case. Huff liked his cases rock solid. Looking back, he said, “I always took great pains to get my cases ready for trial. When the case came up, I just laid out the cards.”
The Day Everything Went Sideways
Flynt’s not-so-secret weapon that week in Lawrenceville was going to be none other than Ruth Carter Stapleton herself — the younger sister of President Jimmy Carter and a well-known Christian evangelist. Stapleton had befriended Flynt not long before the trial and, in a twist that fascinated the press, she claimed to have personally shepherded him towards a spiritual rebirth. He was eager for the jury to hear that he wasn’t the same man who’d once baited the entire American establishment with scandalous magazine spreads.
By the time the trial rolled into early March, the courthouse steps were a magnet for reporters, local onlookers, and churchgoers curious to see whether the infamous smut kingpin had truly found God, or if it was just another headline-grabbing stunt.
On Monday the 6th, the trial paused around midday. Flynt and his lawyer Gene Reeves followed their daily routine to the letter: down Perry Street they went, jackets slung loose in the early spring sunshine, nodding to familiar faces. They’d been regulars at the V&J Cafeteria all week — a simple diner where the meatloaf was reliable and the Jell-O was always set firm. Jeff Britt, the friendly young manager behind the counter, later recalled with a shake of the head that Flynt was, despite the chaos that swirled around him, a polite lunch guest. He stuck to the same order: “Jell-O and grapefruit juice.” Nothing fancy, just something gentle on the stomach before returning to the high drama of the courthouse.
They ate quickly, chatted about the next stage of testimony, and then stepped back into the crisp Georgia air. Reporters milled about the pavement, notepad pages flapping in the breeze. Flynt and Reeves ambled up Perry Street towards the old brick courthouse — an ordinary walk they’d made a dozen times before.
What they didn’t know was that, across the narrow road, a man was waiting under the shadow of an old archway, tucked into the entry of an abandoned building that used to house a car dealership. It was a prime spot: a clear line of sight, plenty of cover, and a fast escape route through the warren of empty back lots behind the main square.
Then it happened. A sharp crack, a pause, then two more, so quick most people at first thought they’d heard a car backfire. But within seconds, it was clear it was something far worse. Nurse Virginia Mathis, working in a doctor’s surgery just round the corner, heard it plain as day: three shots. The final bullet punched through Flynt’s abdomen, leaving him sprawled on the pavement. Reeves, though wounded too, still had enough military instinct from Korea to roll and crawl behind a parked sedan, out of the sniper’s sightline.
The street erupted in panic. Reporters dropped their cameras and scrambled for cover; a few brave souls dashed forward. One of them was a high school senior who’d been visiting a friend in a nearby hardware store. He ran straight towards the fallen men, ignoring the risk. “I ran out the door to where he (Flynt) was laying,” he told a local paper later. “He kept saying, ‘Oh My stomach, oh my stomach,’ and I told him to lay still. Liquid was coming out of his stomach, but it didn’t look like blood.”
Police cars screeched onto the street within minutes. Ambulances arrived so quickly that onlookers said it felt like the whole town turned up to help or gawk. Reporters who’d been trailing Flynt just moments earlier found themselves scribbling eyewitness statements instead.
Surgery, Rumours and Loose Ends
At Lawrenceville’s modest Button Gwinnett Hospital, surgeons fought to stabilise Flynt and Reeves. Word spread like wildfire through the courthouse: the trial was over for now — survival was the only concern. Flynt’s injuries were so severe he was soon airlifted to Atlanta’s Emory Hospital for more specialised care. Over the next few days, he endured three rounds of surgery. He made it through, but the damage was done: he would never walk again, and a severe reaction to medication caused a stroke that left his speech permanently slurred.
No one in Gwinnett needed telling twice: the case was dead in the water. Prosecutors quietly dropped the obscenity charges while the press turned to the bigger question, who had fired those shots, and why?
Local detectives combed the abandoned building, hoping for fingerprints, shell casings, anything. They knocked on every door facing Perry Street, desperate for a witness. A few scattered leads came in: someone thought they’d seen a rusted Chevy idling suspiciously nearby. One unlucky local teen, Bret Eller, got a knock on his door because his car matched a vague witness description. He ended up at the police station calmly telling detectives, “At Central eating lunch, and I can prove it.” And he could, leaving the police back at square one.
Then there was the odd detail that haunted Jeff Britt, the cafeteria owner. Amid the chaos after the shooting, he remembered a stranger, not a regular, not a local, slipping in through the back kitchen door, lingering for a moment, then disappearing without ordering a thing. In the fog of the moment, it hadn’t seemed important. Years later, he still wondered: was that the gunman, ducking the dragnet by hiding right under everyone’s nose?
Lewis Grizzard, Mary and Some Georgia Wisdom
While police fumbled for leads, Atlanta’s best-loved columnist, Lewis Grizzard, decided he’d make his feelings known in his own tongue-in-cheek way. He strolled into Happy Howard’s beer and convenience shop, slapped a few coins on the counter, and bought what he called a “dirty magazine”, not quite Hustler, but close enough for his point.
Two days later, his column appeared with a line that summed up half of Georgia’s attitude to the whole mess. He’d spoken to Mary, a watchful older lady posted outside Flynt’s hospital room, who spoke for more people than anyone liked to admit: “They never should have tried him in this county.” When Lewis poked her about how she felt about racy magazines generally, Mary just shrugged: “It ain’t as bad as selling dope.”
In the end, life rolled on. Flynt dragged himself through Fulton County’s separate charges in 1979. Gene Reeves made a full recovery and went back to work. Flynt stayed bound to his wheelchair but remained determined to stir up as much trouble as possible for the moral crusaders who hated him.
In 1996, Hollywood told the whole story in The People Versus Larry Flynt, with Flynt himself popping up on screen as a judge. The lead actor? Woody Harrelson — whose father, Charles Harrelson, is forever a favourite suspect among JFK conspiracy theorists. Flynt never stopped claiming the assassination was bigger than just Oswald.
Years later, Joseph Paul Franklin, a notorious white supremacist, confessed he’d been the gunman that day in Lawrenceville. He hated that Hustler had shown an interracial couple in one of its spreads. By then, Franklin was already on Death Row in Missouri for a string of racially motivated murders, so Georgia didn’t bother bringing new charges. He was executed in 2013.
"I saw that interracial couple ... having sex ... It just made me sick ... I threw the magazine down and thought, I'm gonna kill that guy."
Through it all, Flynt stuck to his mission: “offend every single person in the world at some point.” And for better or worse, that’s exactly what he did — right up until his heart gave out in 2021 at seventy-eight.
