This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

Coalzo Media.

On March 6, 1978, Larry Flint had jello salad and grapefruit juice for lunch.

He'd had lunch at the V&J cafeteria in Lawrenceville, Georgia,

every day since his trial began the week prior.

A little afternoon, he started to walk the three blocks back to the courthouse.

He never made it, and he never walked again.

Larry Flint was no stranger to controversy.

He courted it, reveled it even.

It was no accident that he was on trial in Georgia,

though this wasn't exactly the venue he'd had in mind.

Prosecutors in Georgia were waging a war on pornography in the mid-1970s,

and the publisher of Hustler magazine was eager to fight on the front line.

When the prosecutor in Fulton County started rounding up the proprietors of adult bookstores

and X-rated movie theaters on obscenity charges, Flint took notice.

When a newsstand owner in Atlanta was arrested for selling issues of hustler,

Flint flew down to Georgia and leased a storefront on Peachtree Street, right in downtown Atlanta.

He stood behind the counter himself, personally selling copies of his pornographic magazine to customers,

and issuing a public challenge to the

Fulton County prosecutor. Come and get me. He was trying to pick a fight in Atlanta. He wanted to go

to court. He didn't even really care if he got convicted. He wanted to challenge the state's

obscenity laws.

...