CLINTON'S HUSTLER
LABASH, MATT
CLINTON’S HUSTLER by Matt Labash HUSTLER PUBLISHER LARRY FLYNT is a hard man to peg. He’s a bounty hunter to Republicans, and a child molester to his estranged daughter, Tonya (he calls her a...
...I asked him about the tape, and he said, with Caeser salad dressing dribbling down his chin, “I don’t know where they got the tape or how the tape was manufactured, but it’s just not true...
...Matt Labash is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...We wouldn’t be in this situation now if more people were like that...
...Moldea also denies any White House connection (not counting the fact that in November, before he started working for Flynt, Moldea gave Clinton’s attorneys taped interviews he’d conducted with two of Starr’s deputies...
...Some argue he’s uniquely suited for it, as a man who publicizes his own barnyard coitus...
...But when a judge ordered Flynt to disclose the source of the tape, he testified that it was “fake as a $3 bill...
...Shortly after his - October 4 Washington Post ad soliciting dirt on politicians, Flynt said the results of his investigation would be published in about six weeks...
...I did Barr...
...Yet even he may have a few leftover secrets...
...In the late 1980s, mainstream newspapers filed friend-of-the-court briefs on Flynt’s behalf after Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell sued Hustler’s publisher over a parody suggesting Falwell had trysted with his mother...
...Two years ago, Penthouse reported the existence of an audiotape on which Flynt admitted to his late wife Althea that he had had unusual involvement with his 13-year-old daughter...
...But Flynt’s respectability reached its apex with the release of the movie about him in 1996...
...Meanwhile, few seem to have noticed how often Flynt’s threats are amended...
...Not [doing it with] chickens, but, uh . . . [sounding perplexed] I never heard that story before...
...He never got that far...
...Records obtained from that time show that Flynt, earlier diagnosed as a sociopathic personality, seemed “preoccupied with various plots” often involving “government and political figures...
...On it, Flynt admits making Theresa “nervous” by, among other things, getting her to undress and comparing her private parts to her mother’s...
...That a porn impresario can hijack impeachment-trial headlines may come as a surprise...
...Newsweek included him in its recent list of “20 media stars...
...Instead, one need only turn to Flynt’s 1996 autobiography, An Unseemly Man...
...He’s a “hero” to First Amendment fetishist Milos Forman, director of the hagiographic The People vs...
...The first chapter, “Playing Chicken,” details Flynt’s formative sexual experience, “out behind the barn” with one of his grandmother’s hens...
...After a manic outburst during one of his many obscenity trials, Flynt was committed to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, for psychiatric observation...
...Flynt says he “was just trying to keep [Theresa] from being so uptight about her body,” but now he doesn’t “want anything to do with the fat little pig...
...Almost invariably his claims were difficult to believe, but Mr...
...I’ve slept in the same bed with my dad probably over 2,000 times as a kid...
...Dan Moldea, who claims to be overseeing the investigation and writing the report, says he doesn’t “exactly know what’s gonna happen with that...
...Inquiring minds assumed he’d hired Terry Lenzner, the Clinton camp’s usual private eye...
...I did Livingston...
...The man Geraldo Rivera calls a “maverick moralist” explains that when he’d finished with the bird, he wrung its neck and tossed it in a creek...
...Today, apparently all is well in the Flynt family...
...And he’s a self-styled fan of the Clintons: Flynt says he’s waging his sexual inquisition against Republicans—aided by his proffered $1 million reward for dirt—because “I love my president...
...Around the same time, Flynt, then running for president, claimed to have sex tapes involving 95 percent of Congress and President Reagan, which he threatened to use in the New Hampshire primary...
...He told his examiners, “Everyone has skeletons in their closet except me, and I’m splashing them on the front pages...
...Journalist Dan Moldea, Flynt’s chief investigator in the anti-hypocrite pogrom, seems proud of his employer...
...But I ran into him last August at a porn-industry conference in Los Angeles, where he presented an award to Nadine Strossen of the American Civil Liberties Union...
...invites him to VIP-screenings, though Flynt twice published unauthorized photos of Kennedy’s mother in the buff on her Greek island...
...The president may deplore the “politics of personal destruction” in the abstract, but he was overheard joking about Flynt at a holiday party...
...By mid- November, he promised an expose within a month...
...The tape was allegedly made by Althea and was in the possession of Bill Rider, Flynt’s former chief of security, and his wife Marsha, Althea’s sister...
...Flynt himself failed to respond to my request for an interview...
...Flynt maintained he could prove their authenticity...
...Who did Barr...
...Since Flynt was recast for posterity as our foremost First Amendment champion, media types and pols have been falling all over him...
...Two years ago, she told me she remembered only “vaguely this taping that you’re talking about, but I know Dad never did anything to me...
...He’s very open and honest about himself...
...In one instance, Flynt said that to bring the truth out, he would “lie like hell,” and that “if you pay someone, they should do what you tell them...
...Theresa works for her father...
...Since Flynt took Washington hostage with career-crippling innuendoes (he helped dispose of speaker-designate Bob Livingston without publishing a word), his reception has cooled, but even now his personal record escapes scrutiny...
...And John Kennedy Jr...
...In 1983, after inserting himself into the John DeLorean case, Flynt played an audio tape for reporters which purported to show that a federal agent had threatened the car maker’s life if he didn’t buy $24 million of cocaine in a government sting...
...While pundits buzz about which Republican will be Flynt’s next victim, prominent Democrats avert their eyes...
...But when I talked to Moldea, he denied knowing anything about this, adding, “Personally, I don’t believe there is a detective firm...
...He’s a bounty hunter to Republicans, and a child molester to his estranged daughter, Tonya (he calls her a “liar” and a “retard...
...Who did Livingston...
...The Riders permitted me to hear and transcribe the tape...
...Flynt has repeatedly asserted that he hired a Washington private investigative firm chock full of ex-FBI and CIA operatives, but he declines to name it...
...If there is, where’s their work...
...Larry Flynt...
...But for two decades, Flynt has captured the imagination of those who refuse to discount him as a mere smut peddler...
...But to truly measure the pornographer who popularized birth-canal-baring photo spreads in a magazine beside which Playboy pales, one needn’t rely on Flynt’s latest antics—his plying reporters with the tale that congressman Bob Barr once avoided answering questions about an affair in a divorce proceeding and paid for his exwife’s abortion in 1983 (back when Barr was pro-choice, 11 years before he ran for the House...
...Even while under the psychiatrists’ gaze, Flynt displayed “his need to be conspicuous and seek attention at all costs...
...I don’t see their work...
...Flynt may not be bluffing, of course, but if he is, it won’t be the first time...
...Flynt has always assumed the role of aggressive deflator of pretense and exposer of hypocrisy...
...In 1976, when facing obscenity-pandering charges in Cincinnati, Flynt was compared to dissident Soviet artists in a petition signed by Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, and 67 other media celebrities...
...Clinton henchman James Carville appeared in the movie, and White House spokesman Joe Lockhart promoted Flynt to “newsmagazine publisher” in a White House press briefing...
...This guy doesn’t have any pretense about his personal morality,” Moldea says...
...Tonya is not the only daughter who’s accused Flynt of inappropriate contact...
...It’s a story Flynt has told for years, though in some quarters it hasn’t hurt his credibility...
...Director Forman gave Flynt a makeover by wrapping him in the flag—inspired perhaps by Flynt himself, who literally wore a stars ’n’ stripes diaper into federal court...
...In December, he claimed it would drop around January 1. And now, the Flynt Report might come as late as April...
Vol. 4 • January 1999 • No. 18
