Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote for the court: “The fact that society may find speech offensive is not a sufficient reason for suppressing it." | AP Photo Supreme Court upholds parody, Feb. 24, 1988

The U.S. Supreme Court voted unanimously on this day in 1988 to overturn a $200,000 judgment awarded to the Rev. Jerry Falwell for his emotional distress at having been parodied in Hustler, a pornographic magazine. In doing so, it reversed both a jury award against Flynt and a ruling by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit that had backed Falwell’s suit.

In its 8-0 ruling, the high tribunal defended Hustler’s right to satirize Falwell as a public figure, overturning a lower court ruling. Although Hustler's 1983 parody was judged to be in poor taste, the court nevertheless held that it fell within the First Amendment's protection of freedom of speech and the press.


The Hustler satire was a takeoff on an advertising campaign for Campari, an Italian aperitif. The real ads were interviews with celebrities talking about their “first time.” The ads featured a double-entendre aimed at giving the impression that the celebrities were talking about their first sexual encounters before revealing it dealt with the first time the celebrities tasted Campari.

Hustler parodied Falwell’s purported first sexual experience as a drunken, incestuous childhood encounter with his mother in an outhouse. Falwell, who died in 2007, a well-known religious conservative and founder of the Moral Majority, a political advocacy group, had sued Hustler and its publisher, Larry Flynt, for libel.

In reversing the award, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, wrote: “This case presents us with a novel question involving First Amendment limitations upon a state’s authority to protect its citizens from the intentional infliction of emotional distress. We must decide whether a public figure may recover damages for emotional harm caused by the publication of an ad parody offensive to him and doubtless gross and repugnant in the eyes of most.

“[Falwell] would have us find that a state's interest in protecting public figures from emotional distress is sufficient to deny First Amendment protection to speech that is patently offensive and is intended to inflict emotional injury, even when that speech could not reasonably have been interpreted as stating actual facts about the public figure involved. This we decline to do.

“At the heart of the First Amendment is the recognition of the fundamental importance of the free flow of ideas and opinions on matters of public interest and concern,” Rehnquist found. “[T]he fact that society may find speech offensive is not a sufficient reason for suppressing it. Indeed, if it is the speaker's opinion that gives offense, that consequence is a reason for according it constitutional protection.”

“The People vs. Larry Flynt," a 1996 film directed by Milos Forman, prominently featured the case.

SOURCE: HUSTLER MAGAZINE, INC. V. FALWELL 485 U.S. 46 (1988)

