Eunice Pringle
Eunice Alice Pringle (1912-1997) was born in Garden Grove,
California and became notoriously famous for accusing movie mogul
Alexander Pantages, a Greek immigrant success story, of raping her on August 9, 1929 in his downtown Los Angeles office when she came to audition for him. The trial that followed in the fall of 1929 found Pantages guilty and he was sentenced to 50 years in prison.
Pringle's aspirations for theatrical stardom lead her to teaming up with a castaway Russian prince by the name of Nicolas Dunaev (various spellings), aspiring screenwriter and producer, who acted as her agent and lover. It is alleged that the two lived together in a
Hollywood motel.
At a time when theatrical opportunities opened the door to women entering the business world for the first time on a major scale, a source of tension in mainstream society which still preferred domesticated women to liberated ones, the rape trial of Alexander Pantages exposed fissures in American society in gender relations.
Hollywood myth alleges that Pringle was to be paid $10,000 dollars to enter Pantages's office and accuse him of rape so that
Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch of the famous American family, would buy the Pantages theatre chain (Pantages adamantly refused to sell him the chain when Kennedy approached him). Later, the myth continues, when she was about to confess this set-up, Pringle died of mysterious poisoning.
What is known is that the trial brought notoriety to Pantages and sympathy to Pringle. Newspapers at the time, just winding up their turn towards tabloid exploitation, thanks to the arrival of tabloid newspapers in the U.S. in 1919, already convicted Pantages before the trial even started in September, 1929. Particularly virulent was the
Los Angeles Examiner owned by famed press baron and anti-immigrant apostle
William Randolph Hearst.
The convinction destroyed Pantages's business and he finally sold his chain to Kennedy's RKO and Warner Brothers studios.
Pringle's life could never be the same. Contrary to myth, it is highly likely that she simply disappeared from sight. She married a businessman named Worthington, moved to
San Diego and proceeded to have a normal life, producing a daughter named Marcy.
