BUFFALO, N.Y. — ​As Hustler publisher Larry Flynt's health deteriorated at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles this week, long-time attorney Paul Cambria was with family and doctors helping to attend to the situation.

Flynt died Wednesday.

"It's been several days that I've been kind of in the loop so to speak and expecting that this would be the result," Cambria said.

Flynt and Cambria's relationship spans decades. The attorney said they first met when he was in his mid-20s when Flynt called to interview him about a trial he'd won in Kansas City.

Shortly afterward, the publisher hired his firm to handle some matters in Cincinnati.

"We went there and while we were there handling those, he was indicted for publishing his Hustler magazine, which had only put out about three issues at that time," Cambria said. "So that's how it all started."

The lawyer said he was with Flynt during an attempted assassination in 1978 while in Georgia for an obscenity trial. The shooting left Flynt paralyzed.

"They actually shot him and our local counsel right in front of me," Cambria said. "I was on the phone with my secretary back in Buffalo when they shot him."

He did not however, represent the entrepreneur during his most famous case when Rev. Jerry Falwell sued Flynt for defamation. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court with justices unanimously agreeing the speech was protected.

"There was a time when he was manic and not medicated and was doing some things that I just thought were disrespectful in the courtroom and so on and I didn't want to be part of it," Cambria said.

Cambria was not technically a character in the 1996 film "The People vs. Larry Flynt," but he said the attorney in the movie was an amalgamation of several attorneys who represented the magazine founder. Just before the movie was released, after a roughly ten year hiatus, he returned as Flynt's general counsel.

"The one thing that impressed me about him was he was a true blue believer in the First Amendment," Cambria said. "He wasn't one of these people who used it as an excuse to do something else. I mean he really believed in it and established some very important legal precedent over the year."

He said Flynt regularly used his wealth to defend the First Amendment and call out hypocrisy. He pointed, as an example, to a 2003 case when they sued Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to gain journalists access to the frontlines in Afghanistan.

"I did and we won," he said. "The next thing you know, there was full access, all the media to the battlefield, and people were getting the straight information as to what was happening."

Flynt had his enemies, including the religious right and feminist groups, due to his controversial acts and depictions of pornography in Hustler. However, Cambria counted him as a friend because he says he was a genuine person.