Wife of Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt. Born Althea Leasure in Marietta, Ohio, Althea and her two sisters, Sherry and Marsha, lived in an abusive home. Althea was orphaned at the young age of 8, when her alcoholic father killed her mother in a rage, and then killed himself. She was then shuttled between relatives and an orphanage. In 1970, then-17-year-old Althea walked into Larry Flynt's Hustler Bar in Columbus, Ohio, to take a job as a stripper. She had inherited $10,000 when she turned 17 but quickly went through the money, spending it on clothes and drugs, when she went into Flynt's bar in search of a job. They immediately hit it off, with Flynt instantly falling in love with her. Althea would relate that his initial attraction seemed to be physical, but after they began their relationship, they fell in love with each other as they discovered how much they had in common. Free-spirited, Althea thought of Larry as a renegade, and they soon became soul mates. She would be Flynt's fourth wife when they were finally married on August 21, 1976. For soul mates, they had a very non-conventional marriage. For her wedding gift, Larry treated the bisexual Althea to a lesbian prostitute in New York City, and to keep her husband happy, Althea would procure sex partners for him. She would later relate that "if I tried to stop that part of his life, I would have lost him." In 1974, Flynt started Hustler magazine, named after his bar, and he named his wife co-publisher. She would be the magazine's first centerfold. As co-publisher, Althea would eventually draw an annual salary of $1.6 million and be credited with some of the magazine's more outrageous concepts, ideas that would get her husband into legal trouble and the magazine accused of being in poor taste (at best) or pornographic (at worst). Althea would defend these ideas as being an _expression of her pet peeve against people being prejudiced; she wanted the world to be less judgmental and used the magazine to express some of her beliefs. In 1977, Flynt had a brief religious conversion and wanted to shut down his magazine, but Althea objected, fearing the loss of $20 million a year that the magazine brought in. But she allowed Larry to pursue his religious beliefs while she kept the magazine alive. In 1985, Althea was diagnosed with AIDS, believed to have been received from a blood transfusion two years earlier during a hysterectomy operation. On the evening of June 27, 1987, she collapsed in the bathtub of their Bel-Air mansion in Los Angeles and drowned. Most authorities believe that she was so weakened from her AIDS treatment that her heart may have given out, but others have speculated that she may have died from a drug overdose. At the time of her death, she weighed only 80 pounds and was extremely weak. She was originally buried in the Flynt Family Plot, but she was disinterred and moved to Fernwood Cemetery near family in Ohio in 2021 after Larry was buried in California.