The People vs. Larry Flynt is a highly manipulative movie designed by Director Milos Forman and Producer Oliver Stone to make a hero out of Larry Flynt, thereby fostering approval for pornography in general and Hustler magazine in particular. Following are some examples of the manipulative techniques used by these men.

A. Forman's Manipulative Techniques

1) Minimizing the Kind of Pornography in Hustler

The pornography that is shown in the movie -- mostly brief glimpses of Hustler covers and large pictures on the walls -- doesn't show the extremely abusive, misogynist, and often violent material that is characteristic of Hustler magazine. If the movie had shown as few as ten examples of pornographic pictures selected by feminists and published in this hardcore magazine, I believe that the reactions of audiences -- particularly the women -- would have been extremely different. The vast majority of women have no idea about the kind of pictures and contemptuous woman-hating texts that appear on virtually every page of Hustler. Milos Forman and Oliver Stone may justify these omissions by saying that they wanted their movie to get an R-rating, but I suspect that they were fully aware of the fact that showing the real Hustler magazine would have sabotaged their goal of heroizing Flynt.
     Similarly, if The People vs. Larry Flynt had shown just ten racist-cum-sexist examples of pornographic pictures in Hustler, I believe that the vast majority of black people as well as politically progressive whites who saw the movie would have had far more critical views of Larry Flynt and his so-called achievements.
     Animal rights advocates would be especially appalled to see the sexual objectification of animals in Hustler, pictures showing animals being beaten and killed, and portrayals of bestiality.
     Hustler also displays material that is anti-Semitic and homophobic. It contains sadistic cartoons about poor and disabled people. And it includes various forms of child pornography: cartoons, text, and photographs of women who look like children ("pseudo-child pornography"). A series of cartoons titled "Chester the Molester" constitute the most notorious example of this genre of porn in Hustler. They were a regular feature of the magazine until cartoonist Dwaine Tinsley was convicted in 1990 for sexually abusing his daughter (a conviction that was later overturned on a legal technicality). Although Flynt maintains that he is opposed to kiddy porn, his claim make no sense in light of these materials and the fact that the "Internet version of Hustler boasts 'the youngest flesh allowed by law'" (Bernstein, 1996, p. 36).
     People who are particularly outraged by racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, ablebodyism, child sexual abuse, and bestiality, would all be especially appalled if examples of such materials had been shown in The People vs. Larry Flynt.

2) Stereotyping Right-Wingers and Erasing Feminist Opponents of Pornography

The People vs. Larry Flynt portrays all the opponents of pornography as stereotypic right-wingers who are physically ugly, stupid, and ridiculous fools in contrast to the relatively good-looking Flynt (Flynt is actually a rather ugly man with a speech impediment that makes him sound drugged or severely intellectually challenged), and his charming, handsome young attorney. This makes Flynt's often-humorous and gutsy defense of pornography appealing by contrast, causing audiences to applaud his feisty attacks on the nasty, smug, hypocritical, and seemingly sexually uptight anti-pornographers.
     Feminists' well-known criticisms of pornography in general and Hustler magazine in particular are completely missing from The People vs. Larry Flynt. The decades of feminist protests involving thousands of women throughout the United States have been totally erased. The enormous body of research on pornography that demonstrates the myriad ways in which it harms women and children is totally ignored. The movie conveys that right-wing prudes and hypocrites are the only critics of pornography. What an abominable lie!
     My hunch is that producer Oliver Stone obtained substantial funding for The People vs. Larry Flynt from pornographers and their collaborators. Tonya's disclosure to me that Larry himself invested considerable money in this movie lends credibility to my hunch.
     Right-wingers aside, there is not a single female character in the film who expresses any reservations about pornography or any criticism of Flynt. This is one of many indications of what a third-rate, simple-minded fairy-tale it is.

3) Lies and Omissions

The People vs. Larry Flynt is full of lies about Larry that make him appear far less reprehensible than he really is. For example:

     a) Flynt is depicted as a loving husband.

The People vs. Larry Flynt conveys that Larry had only one wife (Althea Leasure) and that he had no children, whereas in reality, he married five times and had several children -- at least some of whom he abandoned. He had a very brief marriage with his first wife because she refused to have sex with him otherwise (Flynt, 1996, p. 28). He also left his second wife, Peggy, and their two daughters, Tonya and Judy, shortly after his first child, Tonya, was born (Judy only learned when she was 14 that Larry wasn't her biological father [Labash, 1997]). Larry decided that "it was a good thing for me to move on" because "I felt love for my child [Tonya] but not for her mother" (Soergel, 1997, p. A6).
     The People vs. Larry Flynt, however, portrays Larry as an ever-loving, adoring, and supportive husband who, after one brief bout of violence toward Althea -- his fourth wife -- at the beginning of their relationship, never again abused her physically or sexually. This explains why at least one reviewer has described the movie as "a love story, with tragic overtones" (LaSalle, 1996).
     Althea, who contracted AIDS from an infected needle, is no longer alive to tell the true story of how Larry treated her. However, her brother-in-law, William Rider, maintains that she admitted Larry beat her, and that he had also shot at her on one occasion (1997, p. 48).
     In contrast to the movie's portrayal of Althea dying from a drug overdose and/or drowning in the bathtub, Rider provides convincing evidence that Larry may have murdered her. Rider reports that Althea herself was convinced that Larry was responsible for her developing AIDS (1997, p. 50). According to Rider, she awoke one evening to find one of Larry's flunkies standing over her. On observing her wake up, she saw him quickly put his hand, in which he held a syringe, behind his back. When Althea was diagnosed with AIDS a few months later, she concluded that this man had deliberately infected her with this lethal virus (Rider, 1997).
     Rider also reports that in 1984, Althea named her sister, Marsha, as "the sole heir and chief beneficiary" of her by-then considerable estate (1997, p. 48). Althea was found dead less than two months after Larry succeeded in getting her to change her will so that he became the sole heir and beneficiary (Rider, 1997).
     The movie portrays Larry as heartbroken about Althea's death. "That's another lie," writes Rider.
     ***When Althea's family arrived at Flynt's mansion two days after her death ... he basically ignored them and continued to watch porno films. (1997, p. 48)
     If Larry loved Tonya, as he claimed, he appears to have had no compunction about leaving her as well as her mother and sister Judy in poverty despite his extreme wealth (Soergel, 1997, p. A6; also see Flynt, 1996). Tonya disclosed how "other children made fun of her clothing," and that "for a time, her bedroom was her mother's walk-in closet" (Soergel, 1997, p. A6). Flynt used to fly Tonya and her sister Judy to his mansion from time to time. Tonya told reporter Matthew Soergel that, "Seeing such opulence made her life in Jacksonville harder to bear" (1997, p. A6).

b) Flynt's incestuous abuse of three of his daughters is obliterated.

According to Tonya, Oliver Stone was fully aware of the incestuous abuse perpetrated by Flynt on her and her sister. She said that he also knew about Larry's threats to kill her that had made her too afraid for many years to publish the autobiographical account she is now planning to write (personal communication, December 26, 1996). Stone's desire to heroize Larry despite knowledge of his abhorrent and criminal behavior is immoral and misogynist, and makes him a colluder in Flynt's incestuous offenses. The autobiography that Tonya plans to write will presumably bring some of these ugly truths into the public domain (a movie about her life is also being discussed). However, I very much doubt that Tonya's revelations will be treated with as little skepticism by male critics as they have shown toward the lies and omissions about Flynt in The People vs. Larry Flynt. (More of Tonya's story will be told later in this article.)
     Journalist Matt Labash describes concrete evidence substantiating the claim that Flynt sexually molested another of his daughters, Theresa, when she was 12 or 13 years old. Labash heard and transcribed an audiotape that Althea recorded when she confronted Larry about Theresa's disclosure that he had sexually abused his daughter in 1983 (1997, p. 26; also see Rider, 1997). Larry admitted on the tape that he had told Theresa that "he wanted to see if she was built like her mother," and that he had directed her to take off her gown and panties and to lie down next to him on the bed (Labash, p. 26). Larry also admitted on tape to telling Theresa: "Your c___ even looks like your mother's" (Labash, p. 26). When Althea demanded to know if he had spread Theresa's legs, Larry responded, "No, she didn't want me to" -- thereby admitting that he had either proposed doing this or started doing it.
     Incensed that Althea was so angry about what he had done, Flynt protested, "But Althea, I didn't try to f--- her" (p. 26). Althea reminded him that his paralysis made that impossible. When Althea inquired why Larry had asked his daughter if she'd had an orgasm, he said, as if aggrieved by his daughter's disloyalty, "I was just trying to keep her from being so uptight about her body. That's all, and then she runs her mouth to you" (Labash, p. 26).
     Despite this record, Theresa now "vehemently defends her father from accusations that he molested her:"
     "I've slept in the same bed with my dad probably over 2,000 times as a kid ... [until I was] probably about 15 .... It's just part of my childhood." (Labash, p. 26)
     There can be no doubt at all that Larry Flynt is a guilty of one of the most heinous forms of child molestation: father-daughter incestuous abuse.

B. The Film-makers' Collusion with Larry Flynt

The fact that Larry Flynt plays a small part in The People vs. Larry Flynt (a judge) is one of several indicators that he was on good terms with Forman and Stone. This, combined with Larry's presence on the set, makes it likely that he played a role in the relatively positive way he was portrayed in the movie. "Throughout the film we learned from Larry," Oliver Stone reported (The People vs. Larry Flynt: Production Information, Internet, p. 10). And Janet Yang, one of Stone's two co-producers, noted that, "People who have led dramatically divergent lives have become bonded together by their mutual faith in the project" (p. 9). Clearly Tonya Flynt-Vega had no place on that set and her ugly revelations about her father's violent and sexually abusive behavior toward her and her sister had no place in the script-writers' sanitized portrait of Larry Flynt.
     I have heard from more than one source that material unfavorable to Larry was deleted from the original script. If this is true, I surmise that Forman succumbed to Larry's influence. Perhaps Larry's financial investment in the movie also played its part (Tonia didn't tell me how much Larry invested in the movie, but she said that he is angry as all hell because the relatively poor box office returns have resulted in financial loss). I wonder when, and how often, such a bond has existed between Hollywood film-makers and the subjects of their stories. But regardless of how unprecedented it may be, it indicates that Larry must have been (and presumably still is) pleased with how he was portrayed in this movie (obviously he wouldn't have been happy with, or acted in, a film that showed the true Larry Flynt).

C. The Crass, Unethical Values of Milos Forman and Oliver Stone

In his foreword to Larry's presumably ghost-written autobiography, Oliver Stone describes Flynt as "the late twentieth-century version of Horatio Alger pursuing the American Dream" (Flynt, 1996, p. xi). But Horatio Alger was an American author who wrote books about "impoverished boys who through hard work and virtue achieve great wealth and respect" (The American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd edition, 1992, p. 45; emphasis, mine). Larry can hardly be described as virtuous; nor has he achieved great respect -- except by fellow pornophiles and materialists who believe that being rich deserves respect no matter how many people were exploited on the journey to upward mobility. Stone elaborates on his fanciful Horatio Alger comparison with the following bullshit:
     I find him personally to be more in the rapscallion tradition of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn -- the country boy, misunderstood by so many, trying to figure it all out, rafting down the American psyche of a country gone wacko. (Flynt, 1996, p. xi)
     Among several reasons Stone offers for finding Larry Flynt so "fascinating" (Flynt, 1996, p. xii) is the fact that "He has had sex both with a chicken and with some of the world's most beautiful women" (Carroll, 1996, p. E1). Stone does concede that Larry "is also an exploiter of women" (Flynt, 1996, p. xi), but this apparently, to him, trivial fact appears to have no impact on his view of Larry as a hero (Flynt, 1996, p. xiii). Can we be surprised that a man who finds misogyny and bestiality to be inconsequential would trivialize the kind of pornography characteristic of Hustler magazine in his movie?
     Milos Forman, after apologizing for his dislike of pornography as if it were merely an insignificant difference in his and Larry's aesthetic taste, goes on to say that, "As long as I live, I will always admire Larry Flynt: his life, his courage, and his tenacity" (Flynt, 1996, p. xv). What an ignorant, morally despicable, male-biased statement!

I anticipate that this grossly distorted movie, which is full of lies and omissions, will contribute to the mainstreaming of Hustler and the viciously sexist kinds of material that this magazine contains. I consider Milos Forman and Oliver Stone to be guilty of promoting pornography in The People vs. Larry Flynt -- and therefore rape and other forms of violence against women and children. I believe the audience reaction to Larry and pornography would have been very different had The People vs. Larry Flynt included the following information:
     a) The fact that Larry sexually abused his daughter Tonya for many years (Tonya's sister Judy is currently denying that she was abused), as well as his daughter Theresa;
     b) Ten examples of pornographic pictures in Hustler magazine selected by feminists.
     I believe that the insertion of this information/material in The People vs. Larry Flynt would have lessened the pro-pornography effects that this movie will have, as well as making it a less grossly flawed movie than it is now. As Gloria Steinem has so eloquently stated in her Op-Ed piece for the New York Times:
     Let's be clear: A pornographer is not a hero, no more than a publisher of Ku Klux Klan books or a Nazi on the Internet.... What's left out [of the movie] are the magazines's images of women being beaten, tortured and raped, women subject to degradations from bestiality to sexual slavery. (New York Times, 1997. p. A13)