The reviled porn actor known as Max Hardcore, who did prison time over his degraded and potentially abusive videos, has died at the age of 66.
Hardcore, whose real name was Paul Little, had reportedly been battling thyroid cancer and died Monday from septic shock and pneumonia.
“He was almost at the finish line for the chemotherapy,” his business partner Paul Munoz told Adult Video News, sharing that Hardcore chose to come back home instead of spending the week at the hospital, which is “when things went south for him.”
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He worked in porn for nearly three decades, right up until he was diagnosed with cancer—with a hiatus while he was in prison. He appeared in more than 500 videos and directed more than 360. His work tested “the limits of acceptability,” former AVN writer Gerrie Lim wrote in her 2006 book In Lust We Trust: Adventures in Adult Cinema.
His videos sought shock value through their degrading, violent approach, often featuring women getting urinated on or made to vomit, as well as dressing up female performers to look like little girls.
His divisive style caught legal fury through their disturbing nature. In May 2007, he and his production company Max World Entertainment were indicted by a Tampa, Florida grand jury on charges of distributing obscene material by mail and the internet, and he was sentenced to 46 months in prison in 2008.
The case came down to whether his perverse videos essentially constituted ‘obscene matter’ due to their illicit nature. The Justice Department wrote in a motion that “each of the movie clips and DVDs charged in the Indictment portray abusive sexual acts between adult males and females dressed to look and act like minor children.”
Despite his indictment, Hardcore was unperturbed, and continued making adult films once he was released in 2011. He also appeared on the Howard Stern show in 2007, amid the legal drama, after obtaining a court order to travel to New York while he was out on bail.
