Larry Flynt: I’d Torture, Not Kill, Man Who Paralyzed Me

'I would love an hour in a room with him and a pair of wire-cutters and pliers'

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Publisher Larry Flynt arrives at the American Civil Liberties Union Bill of Rights dinner in Beverly Hills
Fred Prouser / Reuters

Larry Flynt, head of Larry Flynt Publications and publisher of 'Hustler' magazine, arrives in his gold-plated wheelchair as a guest at the American Civil Liberties Union Bill of Rights dinner in Beverly Hills, California December 11, 2006.

The man who shot and paralyzed Larry Flynt in 1978 is set to be executed for murder in November, but the Hustler founder wrote in the Hollywood Reporter Thursday that he has mixed feelings about the sentence:

I would love an hour in a room with him and a pair of wire-cutters and pliers, so I could inflict the same damage on him that he inflicted on me. But, I do not want to kill him, nor do I want to see him die.

Joseph Paul Franklin confessed to shooting Flynt because of a photo in Hustler that featured a black man with a white woman. Franklin shot and killed interracial couples, civil rights activists, and had bombed synagogues.

“As I see it, the sole motivating factor behind the death penalty is vengeance, not justice,” Flynt wrote, “and I firmly believe that a government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself.”

[Hollywood Reporter]