Daily News from New York, New York • 139

2 Features yif 3fsfHl 3 otS 8 5 fi turned from high-living to God. Publisher Larry Flynt's wife, Althea, has given up her life of hard drugs and heavy rock following their legal woes. Cristiha DeLorean and RICHARD CORKERV DAILY NEWS Althea Flynt are wives whose life styles flip-flopped in the wake of their husbands' legal problems By TIIEO WILSON iRISTINA Ferrare DeLorean was a party- loving, high-living high-fashion model with a lusty sense of humor, a six-figure income of her own and a millionaire husband who proudly complained about their hectic social schedule and fondly catered to his wife's expensive tastes. Althea Leasure Flynt was a hard-playing pub lisher, into drugs, heavy metal rock, outrageous purple and poison-green hairdos and punk clothes, who helped her husband run their million-dollar porn magazine empire and joined him in a series of CM Federal Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. She was dressed so conservatively, nobody recognized her.

Cristina, on her 420-acre New Jersey estate, and Althea, in her 20-room Bel Air mansion, are changed women, and their lives have been affected by the same thing their husbands' embroilment in the criminal justice system. They have nothing else in common. They have never met, so far as anyone knows (even though Larry Flynt involved himself in the John DeLorean case by leaking a stolen government video tape of DeLorean's arrest to CBS). But 33-year-old Cristina and 31-year-old Althea are going through the same wrenching experiences. They are wives who have learned to cope when their husbands got into trouble.

John DeLorean, 59, tall, immaculately groomed, handsome, a former star of the auto industry, is in Federal Court, defending himself against drug-trafficking charges. Accused of conspiring to distribute $24 million worth of cocaine to save his failing auto company, he could receive a 72-year prison sentence and a $190,000 fine if convicted. Aside from the drug charges, he is being sued in civil court by creditors who are trying to take over all of his assets. Except for the days of jury selection, Cristina has been with him daily during the trial's first nine weeks. She is loving, supportive and conservatively attired.

Larry Flynt, 41, pudgy, pasty, a paraplegic since 1978 as the result of an attempt to murder him, is serving a 15-month sentence for contempt of court. He has just been ordered to undergo more tests to determine his mental competence, and could lose all control of the porn empire he and Althea built together. Cristina was a born-again Christian even before DeLorean was arrested in October 1982. But since their ordeal started, she has stepped up her Christian zeal. She says she has converted her husband, and although she had been baptized previously, she joined him in a double baptism last year in the pool at their Bedminster, N.J., estate.

She has become increasingly vocal about her religious beliefs and her husband's newfound religion, and in an interview with Contemporary Christian magazine, published in April, she described the difference in her life style since her husband was arrested. "I haven't taken out a real piece of jewelry in a year, because I don't care," she said. "I used to (Continued on page 6) bizarre incidents that nearly landed her behind bars. Today, Cristina is an earnest, born-again Christ ian, who says she has given up without regret the trappings of her former life because "my values have changed and "my life before the gran CD a CD aj deur of the New York skyline, the friends, food, wine, jewels, furs, cars, that whole thing they don't mean anything to me anymore." Today, Althea is off drugs and out of her nose rings and rainbow hair. In a soft, contrite voice, she apologized recently to a federal judge in California for damaging a Missouri prison metal detector and biting and kicking a deputy U.S.

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