Eunice Irene Pringle (born March 5, 1912, Garden Grove, California — died March 26, 1996) was an American starlet who garnered notoriety 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. He was successful, however, on appeal.
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).
What is known is that the trial brought notoriety to Pantages and sympathy to Pringle. Newspapers at the time, thanks to the arrival of tabloid newspapers in the USA in 1919, already convicted Pantages before the trial even started in September 1929. Particularly virulent was the Los Angeles Examiner owned by press baron William Randolph Hearst.
The conviction destroyed Pantages's business. Despite his success on appeal he sold his chain to Kennedy's RKO and Warner Bros. Pringle's life would also never be the same. Wanting nothing more to do with show business or the press, she simply disappeared from sight. In 1935, Pringle married Robert White, the heir to a furniture business. After divorcing White, she married Richard Ellis Worthington, a psychologist, in 1947. They lived in Chicago for several years before moving to San Diego County in 1955. The couple had one child, a daughter, Marcy. She died in 1996, aged 84.