Alexander Pantages Trials: 1929

Next, Giesler asked Pantages' accuser, "Is that the dress you were wearing the day you say you were attacked?"

"No."

Eunice Pringle was dressed like a 13-year-old schoolgirl: blue dress, Dutch collar and cuffs, black stockings and Mary Jane shoes, small black bag and black gloves, long hair down her back and tied with a bow.

Giesler asked Judge Charles Fricke to order her to dress the next day in the same outfit and makeup she had worn to the Pantages Theatre. The jurors then saw not a schoolgirl but a well-endowed young woman in a revealing and (to use Giesler's word) "slinky" scarlet dress. Now his cross-examination tried to explore earlier acts of unchastity on her part—including a live-in affair with 40-year-old Nick Dunave, a Russian dancer. But the judge sustained the prosecution's objections and cut off the line of questioning.

The jury found "The Great God Pan" guilty. His sentence: 50 years in state prison. On appeal to the California Supreme Court, Giesler filed a three-volume, 1,200-page brief citing hundreds of cases and authorities. It pointed out that the lower court had erred in not permitting testimony on the earlier immoral conduct of the complaining witness. "There were so many new elements in that brief," Giesler later said, "that the final decision established precedent throughout the nation."

The state supreme court granted Pantages a new trial. Admitting evidence of Eunice Pringle's private life and conduct, it marked the first time in which the defense could probe the morals of an underage girl who claimed that she was criminally attacked.

Giesler even implied a conspiracy to frame Pantages. The jury found him not guilty. On her deathbed many years later, Pringle alleged that her boyfriend, Nick Dunave, had received a big payment from Joseph P. Kennedy, who had been determined to gain control over movie distribution.

In recent years, the trend in both federal and state courts has been to rule inadmissible evidence concerning the alleged victim's past sexual behavior in rape cases. Such evidence was barred from federal courts by Congress in 1978 (Rule of Evidence 412).