Legal case debates classiness of Flynt family smut
APNews
Dec 11, 2009
When it comes to peddling porn, Larry Flynt wants you to know his videos of people having sex are a cut above other smut on the rack.
So when a pair of nephews Flynt personally groomed for the porn business decided to launch their own company last year and use the family name, the creator of "Barely Legal," "Busty Beauties" and "Daddy Gets Lucky" wasted no time suing the upstarts for trademark infringement.
Flynt accused his brother Jimmy Flynt's sons in federal court of tarnishing his image by launching Flynt Media Corp. and producing a series of videos he says are nothing but cheap knockoffs.
"The junk they publish hurts my reputation, which in turn hurts my revenue," the gruff, gravelly voiced porn king testified in U.S. District Court this week, where a Flynt family feud is playing out before a stone-faced jury and a no-nonsense judge.
The four women and four men of the mostly middle-aged jury stoically viewed photos of some of the nephews' DVD boxes. Images of naked, well-endowed women on the front and people in all sorts of contortions on the back, were flashed on a giant-screen TV right next to them.
A few jurors scribbled notes. Some studied the images carefully. But there was nary a snicker, a blush nor a smile.
With Judge A. Howard Matz bearing down on the attorneys to keep things moving, the jury was expected to get the case by late Friday afternoon. Flynt is seeking unspecified damages.
The porn mogul, who was paralyzed when he was shot by a white-supremacist sniper in 1978, sat in court in his gold-plated, velvet-lined wheelchair Tuesday and Wednesday.
He testified that his nephews, Jimmy Flynt Jr. and Dustin Flynt, were a pair of bumbling, incompetent employees that he only kept on the payroll for years out of a sense of family obligation.
Jimmy Jr. worked for him for 17 years and Dustin Flynt for 10, and both had risen to management positions at Larry Flynt Publications before they were fired in November 2007.
"I felt they were doing a horrible job," said Flynt, who owns Hustler magazine and other publications, operates Internet Web sites, retail stores, produces films, owns pricey real estate and even markets a line of clothing.
Their father, who isn't named in the lawsuit, is fighting his own battle with Flynt in Ohio, suing his brother for attempting to evict him from a building in Cincinnati where he operates a Hustler retail store.
Larry Flynt, whose privately owned company has been said to be worth tens of millions of dollars, testified Wednesday that he terminated his brother last year to save money for his legal battle against the nephews.