Jerry Falwell v. Larry Flynt

Describing the case as “a truly remarkable episode in American legal history,” Smolla narrates the $45 million lawsuit that televangelist and founder of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, brought against Flynt. The main issue centered on the question of whether or not one could be sued for inflicting emotional distress upon a public figure. After viewing an ad parody from Hustler magazine that describes Falwell’s first sexual encounter with his mother in an outhouse while drunk on Campari liqueur, Falwell said, “I think I have never been as angry as I was at that moment. . . . I somehow felt that in all of my life I had never believed that human beings could do something like this.” Smolla proclaims, “Flynt's coarse speech is nothing but excrement, a form of moral pollution fouling the cultural environment,” but he also wrote an amicus curia brief in favor of him. This book offers an extremely in-depth view of the four-year battle, describes the details of Flynt’s unanimous victory over Falwell, and prints the opinions rendered by the Justices in their ruling.