Smut titan Larry Flynt delivered a Veterans Day shocker, saying his wife talked him out of printing topless photos of Iraqi POW Jessica Lynch.
The Hustler magazine publisher vowed to lock the salacious snapshots in a vault after his wife, Elizabeth Barrios, snapped, “America is going to hate you for this!”
“I’m getting so much heat for this, it’s unbelievable,” the purveyor of porn told the Daily News. “I’m going to take [the photos] out of circulation.”
But the man who put the provocative photos in Flynt’s hands said they still might be published, possibly on the Internet.
“The market will ultimately dictate what transpires,” said David Hans Schmidt, who has brokered Playboy and Penthouse pictorials of Paula Jones and Tanya Harding.
Schmidt struck the six-figure deal with Flynt on behalf of two former soldiers who served with Lynch at Fort Bliss, Tex.
“The soldiers may want to come forward. That’s up to their conscience,” said Schmidt, who recently posted nude pictures of Amber Frey, the ex-mistress of alleged wife-killer Scott Peterson, on his Web site. “If they want to sell the story, I would never abandon a client.”
Flynt’s change of heart came less than 24 hours after telling The News he would publish the pictures of the 20-year-old former Army private cavorting in the buff with two fellow soldiers in a prewar romp.
“I’m forfeiting millions of dollars,” said Flynt – adding he could have made as much as he did off nude paparazzi shots of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, which launched his empire. “Sometimes there are things more important than money.”
Flynt said his intent was not to bash Lynch but to expose the government’s desperate attempt to find a feel-good hero in the Iraqi war. “Maybe I’ve become a little insensitive,” Flynt said. “All my life has been about sexual liberation. Now here I am condemning this girl for being a little on the loose side. It sort of rings of hypocrisy.”
The controversy erupted as the hobbled former soldier was squired around New York for a series of network TV interviews on the book about her, “I’m a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story,” which went on sale yesterday. It quickly shot to No. 18 on the Amazon.com best seller list.
But her attorney spent most of the day battling bad publicity from the topless photos.
“She has dealt with life-threatening injuries; she has dealt with assaults to her body. The revelation of these photographs is nothing in comparison,” attorney Stephen Goodwin said.
Lynch’s future father-in-law, Juan Fuentes, 46, of Colorado Springs, also defended her yesterday. “They’re a thing of the past and they’re nobody’s business,” Fuentes told The News. “These guys who sold them, they’re just lowlifes. They just want to make a buck out of Jessi.”