The first, addressed to a half million members of the Moral Majority described the ad parody, while the second mailing to 30,000 “major donors” included (with eight offensive words blacked out) a copy of the actual Campari ad. To raise money for the legal effort, Falwell send out two mailings. Falwell later testified that when he saw the parody ad, “I think I have never been as angry as I was at that moment.” He never believed, he said, that “human beings could do something like this” and “felt like weeping.” The most troubling aspect of the satire, according to Falwell, was “the besmirching and defiling of my dear mother's memory.”įalwell decided to sue Larry Flynt and Hustler Magazine for $45 million. Back home in Lynchburg later that day, however, Falwell asked a staff member to buy the current issue of the magazine. He glanced at the ad and brushed off the reporter’s question. news conference in November 1983, Falwell was asked by a reporter whether he had seen the parody ad featuring in the latest issue of Hustler. Not to be taken seriously."Īs he left a Washington, D. In the ad, Falwell is quoted as saying, "We were drunk off our God-fearing asses on Campari.and Mom looked better than a Baptist whore with a $100 donation." At the insistence of legal counsel, the group agreed to place at the bottom of the ad the words: "Ad parody.
Falwell’s anti-pornography crusade always made him an inviting target for Hustler satire, and the group was especially enthusiastic about the parody ad because of what they saw as the humorous contrast between the outhouse encounter and the actual lifestyle of the evangelical teetotaler. The parody, as the idea was developed, had Jerry Falwell recounting his “first time,” which turned out not to be his first taste of Campari, but rather his first sexual encounter-a drunken adventure with his mother in an outhouse. Salzbury proposed a parody of the well-known advertisements for Campari, which featured celebrities relating their “first times” (playing on the obvious double entendre) drinking the popular liqueur. The group debated an idea for an ad parody that had been suggested by a consultant named Michael Salzbury. In August 1983, Flynt and a group of editors and lawyers met in the conference room of Larry Flynt Publications in Los Angeles. He was especially outspoken in his criticism of pornography, which he claimed threatened the moral health of the country. Falwell promoted an anti-abortion, anti-gay, pro-Israel agenda. Falwell co-founded the socially conservative and politically active Moral Majority in 1979, an organization that was credited with helping to elect Ronald Reagan the next year. Obscenity trials soon followed, including one in Georgia, where Flynt was shot and paralyzed by a white supremacist outraged by photos in Hustler showing an interracial couple.įlynt's growing pornography empire also attracted criticism from many religious leaders, including the the Reverend Jerry Falwell. The publication's August 1975 issue of nude photos of Jackie Kennedy Onassis brought attention and dramatically increased sales for Hustler. When recession pushed his string of Ohio-based strip clubs toward bankruptcy in 1974, Flynt turned what had been a black-and-white newsletter called the " Hustler Newsletter" into the most sexually explicit magazine in the United States. Shortly after his discharge from the Navy at age 22, Larry Flynt launched a career in the adult entertainment business that would, within just over a decade, make him one of the nation's best known pornographers.
HUSTLER MAGAZINE COVERS 1988 TRIAL
The trial and appeals that followed would provide great theater, produce a landmark Supreme Court ruling on the First Amendment, and eventually lead to one of the most unlikely of friendships. When the Campari parody ad appeared in the November 1983 issue of Hustler, the founder of the politically-engaged organization Moral Majority sued, alleging defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. They sprang from the imagination of a parody writer for Hustler Magazine. Neither the incestuous sex nor the interview ever happened, of course. Asked about his first sexual experience by an interviewer, Reverend Jerry Falwell said, "I never really expected to make it with Mom, but then after she showed all the other guys in town such a good time, I thought 'What the hell!'" Falwell went on to describe a Campari-fueled sexual encounter with his mother in an outhouse near Lynchburg, Virginia.
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