Larry Flynt, the magazine’s publisher, was the “the sultan of smut” who rejoiced in pushing every Puritanical button this country had.

The “Chester the Molester” cartoon first appeared in Hustler’s pages in 1976. The origin of the term many of us grew up using jokingly, the strip starred Chester, a beefy middle-aged man shown in various pedophilic acts

Then in 1989, the cartoon’s creator, Dwaine B. Tinsley, was arrested. Art, it appeared, had imitated life. His 18-year-old daughter said he had been raping her for years.

The daughter reported that many of the scenes depicted in Tinsley’s stip were directly drawn from things he had done to her.

Tinsley’s sexual abuse began at a hotel when she was 11. Then, when she was 13, she moved in with her father to escape her abusive mother and that was when Tinsley began having sex with her two to five times a week for five years. In May of 1989, at the urging of a boyfriend when she was 18, she report felt like this is what I had to do in order for my father to show me love and attention.” Tinsley explained that he hadn’t contradicted his daughter on the “cool call” because he was concerned about her drug use and that she had previously threatened to find ways to hurt him

one of the notes kept by his wife partially corroborated the first incident. It occurred in a Los Angeles hotel room, but in his version the 11 year-old had initiated the sexual contact. He said he had been sleeping and in a semi-awake state he had felt “a warm soft feminine body pushed against me. I cuddled and stroked the legs and hips. Suddenly I sprang awake and jumped. I realized it was Veronica — my daughter! I was mortified

He would later admit to other incidents that at best seemed extreme lapses in judgement, at worst telltale signs of sexual abuse: drunkenly falling asleep in her bed, entering her room while she was sleeping in the nude

Veronica’s word against Tinsley and neither looked very good. Tinsley drew lewd pictures of men abusing little girls. Veronica had behavioral problems in school and a cocaine habit. There were inconsistencies in her story about the timeline of events. To some, these inconsistencies and “character” issues were the obvious scars of an entire adolescence riddled with sexual trauma. To others, it was the proof of an instability that had manufactured a claim at an easy target

The accusations against Tinsley came at a time of hypervigilance about child sexual abuse. The McMartin Preschool trials — where Los Angeles nursery school teachers were accused (wrongly, it turned out) of sexually abusing children in satanic rituals — were going on simultaneous to Tinsley’s trial. Stories about both trials often ran on the same page in newspapers. A few years earlier, the Catholic church had entered the national spotlight when a priest admitted to molesting 37 boys, and soon other similar claims followed. The same year of Tinsley’s trial, an article ran in the Toronto Star proclaiming “Sex with children is the crime of the moment.”

On January 5th, 1990 the jury convicted him on five counts, acquitted him of six, and deadlocked on the remaining five. The judge declined to impose the maximum 12-year sentence “out of consideration for the defendant’s wife and two daughters"

Two years later, another judged reversed the conviction on appeal. Showing the cartoons in the courtroom had been gratuitous and unfairly biased the jurors, the judge said. In a strange reversal, the very drawings that appeared to originally incriminate him now exonerated him. By February of 1992, he was walking free.

https://timeline.com/chester-molester-dwaine-tinsley-ce8f3cb025a4

According to Levin, Tinsley was reacting to the sickness of society, Reagan’s America where everything was clean on the surface but dirty underneath

Dwaine had not planned to tread the tightrope walk above the razor-bottomed pit that is a career hand-in-hand with a ball bat-wielding pervert; but he had pursued his artistic vision, and his vision had produced Chester. If he took his art seriously, which he did – which he certainly did – it was his responsibility to push it to extremes, to grind Chester against the most noses, to fling him into the most eyes.

This passage was very important to me because it shows that Chester was art for Tinsley, more an expression he chose rather than a satire used to expose. It’s no crime in the USA to think such thoughts or even to reproduce such thoughts on paper, but if Tinsley wanted to rub our noses in his art, he wasn’t engaging in satire.

Tinsley was convicted because the district attorney made the trial as much about Chester as it was about anything Tinsley may have done to his daughter.

By using Dwaine’s cartoon’s against him… the state had not only improperly imposed itself on one side of a sociopolitical debate, it had made his expressions of unpopular ideas appear indicative of criminal acts. If it was allowed to hang Dwaine with a rope woven in part from his creations, all artists would be discouraged from describing, in song or film or on the printed page, actions that might be used against them by other vengeful district attorneys.

I agree with this, and so did the judge who reversed the child abuse conviction against Tinsley because his trial had been contaminated when his cartoons were used as proof against him.

Pornography and art that many can dispassionately consider vile does not have to have a purpose that is readily identifiable to everyone who sees or consumes it. While at times Tinsley admitted that he was just being disgusting to be disgusting, he also insisted there was a cultural and critical morality to his Chester cartoons.

http://www.oddthingsconsidered.com/most-outrageous-by-bob-levin/