Ron Jeremy superfan raped, killed L.A. women. Did prosecutors miss chances to stop him?

In January, a dozen women walked into a downtown Los Angeles courtroom and described nightmarish experiences with a man named David Pearce.

Some had met Pearce, 43, at parties. Other times it was through a dating app, where he posed as a well-connected Hollywood player, talent agent or entertainment executive who could advance their careers.

Each woman said he gave them a drink or pill that left them feeling “fuzzy,” “sick” or unconscious. Once incapacitated, they testified, Pearce sexually assaulted them.

Pearce was convicted last month of raping seven women and drugging two others who died. But previously undisclosed records obtained by The Times raise questions about whether prosecutors missed chances to put him behind bars before any lives were lost.

Documents released in response to a public records request show Los Angeles police presented rape allegations against Pearce to L.A. County prosecutors at least three times from 2007 to 2020. The cases mirrored the allegations Pearce later faced at his trial, with women claiming he drugged and assaulted them.

Some victims rights’ advocates now question if the November 2021 deaths of Christy Giles and Hilda Marcela Cabrales Arzola could have been prevented. After a night of partying, the women were lured to Pearce’s Olympic Boulevard apartment, where a jury found he supplied drugs that killed them.

“This is exactly the type of predator that sexual assault investigators and prosecutors are looking for, these are the kind of people they want to hunt down and stop,” said Joshua Ritter, a former L.A. County prosecutor who served as a victims rights attorney for Giles’ husband. “It’s kind of like the whole job.”

In interviews last month, Pearce’s family members shared other details about his past that have not been previously reported. His mother and sister said he grew up as a “theater kid” in Maryland before moving to Los Angeles, where the aspiring producer struggled to break into the entertainment industry and became friends with one-time porn king Ron Jeremy, who is also accused of being a serial rapist.

When police searched Pearce’s room in 2021, they found several pieces of memorabilia signed by Jeremy and “trophies for pornography,” according to a copy of a search warrant.

Allison Pearce described Jeremy as a corrupting influence on her younger brother, who became so obsessed with the adult film star that in a fight with his father he once shouted: “You’re not my Dad anymore. Ron Jeremy is my Dad.”

Testifying in his own defense, Pearce said he partook in drug-fueled escapades at nightclubs and frequently offered his home as a crash pad for friends.

He admitted to using cocaine with Giles and Arzola, but denied providing their fatal dose of drugs. Michael Ansbach, a former friend of Pearce who was present that night and initially arrested in the killings, told the jury he and the girls became violently ill after Pearce served them a powder he referred to as “the best stuff.”

When the women became unresponsive, Pearce waited more than 12 hours to seek medical attention, prosecutors said. Ansbach testified that he pleaded with Pearce to take the women to a hospital and was met with a chilling reply: “Dead girls don’t talk.”

Ansbach declined an interview request through his attorney.

Security camera footage captured masked men dumping the women’s limp bodies in front of hospitals before speeding off in a car with no plates.

Pearce faces life in prison without the possibility of parole. A sentencing hearing set for last week was delayed after Pearce, who maintains his innocence, fired his defense attorney. He plans to file a motion seeking a new trial.

Ilene Granat-Pearce and her son, David Pearce, eat dinner together in Los Angeles.

(Ilene Pearce)

His new lawyer, Ronda Dixon, said the prosecution’s use of “prior bad acts witnesses” was grounds for the verdict to be overturned.

“It was unduly prejudicial and they did not necessarily match up with the fact pattern in this case,” she said.

According to the D.A.’s records provided to The Times, Los Angeles police sought criminal charges against Pearce on five separate occasions before Giles and Arzola died of overdoses. The date rape drug GHB was found in Giles’ system, according to testimony given at trial, but Pearce was not convicted of giving her the substance.

In three of those prior instances, Pearce was accused of sexually assaulting women who were unconscious or too intoxicated to consent at the time, according to the documents.

None of the alleged victims are identified by name in the records. Prosecutors cited either insufficient evidence or an uncooperative witness when dropping the charges.

Several other women who had not previously reported Pearce to police also came forward after his arrest in the deaths of Giles and Arzola made headlines.

“The instant case was filed against Pearce once the totality of the evidence ensured we could successfully prove charges beyond a reasonable doubt,” the district attorney’s office said in a statement.

A district attorney’s office spokeswoman confirmed prosecutors had previously weighed filing charges related to three of the women whose allegations led to criminal charges in the recent trial.

Gloria Allred, an attorney who has decades of experience representing victims of sexual abuse, said the failure to pursue charges in the prior cases should spark outrage.

“Why did two women have to die for this kind of analysis to be done? This is a travesty,” she said. “It didn’t have to happen, and it did happen. The only thing we can do now is try to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”

Giles and Cabrales both came to L.A. to pursue career dreams. An Alabama native, Giles was an aspiring model and quickly met her future husband, who she married at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada in 2019. A top-tier architecture student from Mexico, Arzola was working as a project manager in L.A. when she died.

The two became fast friends in Los Angeles, and were partying at a downtown L.A. rave when they met Pearce, who was out with Ansbach and his co-defendant Brandt Osborn. The men had just come from a shoot for a documentary at a Koreatown club and Pearce and Ansbach had been using cocaine all day, according to trial testimony. (Jurors could not reach a verdict against Osborn, who faced two counts as an accessory to murder. It is not clear if prosecutors will retry him.)

An undated photo of Christy Giles, one of two women who died in 2021 after using drugs with David Pearce.

(Jan Cilliers)

The groups collided in what Pearce called a “drug room” at the rave, where he said “people were chopping up drugs, doing bumps, exchanging or handing drugs to each other.” The chance meeting led the women back to Pearce’s Olympic Boulevard apartment, the last place anyone would see them conscious.

A little more than a year earlier, in July 2020, a woman claimed Pearce “may have” had sex with her while “she was not capable of consenting,” according to a declination memo, a document that prosecutors are required to generate when they reject a request for charges from a police agency.

Prosecutors declined to bring charges stemming from that case and a similar 2007 allegation due to “insufficient evidence,” D.A.’s records show.

Another time, in August 2014, a woman accused Pearce of giving her an “unidentified pill” that left her “intoxicated” leading to him digitally penetrating her without consent, according to a separate district attorney’s office memo.

A hospital exam found no evidence of physical trauma in the 2014 case, however, and Pearce denied the assault, according to court records. After an initial rebuff from prosecutors, the LAPD’s elite Robbery-Homicide Division reopened the case in 2017 — only to have it rejected again due to an “uncooperative” victim, the D.A. records show.

An LAPD spokeswoman declined to explain why an RHD detective reopened the 2014 case against Pearce three years later, or comment on the D.A.’s charging decisions.

“While we cannot provide additional details regarding the cases you referenced, we remain steadfast in pursuing justice for victims,” LAPD Detective Meghan Aguilar said in a statement. “We are grateful that, in the recent case, the survivors were able to have their voices heard, and we are pleased that justice has been served with David Pearce’s conviction.”

Legal advocates for sexual assault victims said prosecutions often boil down to a victim’s word against their alleged abuser’s, but recent cases have shown the power of having many accusers all making similar claims.

The high-profile rape convictions of Harvey Weinstein and Danny Masterson involved prosecutors calling “prior bad acts witnesses” to testify about patterns of bad behavior that stretched years.

The same strategy was used against Pearce, with the jury allowed to hear from five women who made sexual assault allegations against him that did not lead to criminal charges.

After reviewing the declination memos, Ritter, the victims rights attorney, said he was concerned that documents related to the 2020 allegations against Pearce didn’t mention the fact that the D.A.’s office had reviewed similar claims against him twice before.

A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office would not say if the prosecutor reviewing the 2020 case considered the past allegations against Pearce in their charging decision.

“It’s sad to say, but I just think this is a really tragic case of someone falling through the cracks of the system,” Ritter said. “You can say mistakes were made. I don’t know if you can chalk that up to a lack of diligence or a horrific side effect of these cases being very hard to bring.”

Ilene Granat-Pearce said her son was a homebody in his early years who grew to love performing in stage plays and musicals in Maryland. He studied film and television at UCLA, she said. After college, Pearce took up permanent residence in L.A., and his explanations of his lifestyle to his mother were vague.

“I didn’t know very much. I think I preferred it that way because he’s not going to listen to me,” she said. “He was funny. I don’t know how else to explain it — sometimes he would call me and he would be somebody else.”

Sometimes, Pearce gave her glimpses. In 2016, she said they met in Las Vegas when he was supposedly booking DJs for Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club.

Another time, she joined him at Burbank’s famous “Porn Star Karaoke” nights alongside Jeremy, the now-disgraced adult film actor who was for decades the industry’s best-known male performer.

Granat-Pearce said her son “looked up” to Jeremy and the two would often spend Jewish holidays together.

“For David’s birthday one year we had dinner … and Ron proceeded to play his harmonica. He was kind of a little crazy, but also a little funny. He was always very respectful to me, to David, as far as I could see,” she said. “He was more like family than he was a friend.”

Pearce even began dating a woman in 2019 who worked for Jeremy, according to Jeff Voll, his previous defense attorney. The two lived together briefly.

Jeremy was indicted on 30 counts of sexual assault just a few months before Giles and Arzola’s deadly night out with Pearce, but the former porn king’s case never made it to a jury. He was declared incompetent to stand trial in 2023 due to worsening dementia, and is now living in a private residence where he is “essentially bedridden.” L.A. County Superior Court Judge Eleanor Hunter barred prosecutors from referencing Pearce’s relationship with Jeremy at trial.

Pearce’s older sister, Allison, said her brother was obsessed with portraying wealth and influence despite failing to find success in Hollywood.

“Since he’s moved to L.A. he’s just turned into someone that is very fake,” she said. “He would buy his Prada and Armani at secondhand stores, a Goodwill in Beverly Hills.”

Records also show Pearce was arrested by Beverly Hills police for simple drug possession just six weeks before Giles and Arzola’s deaths in 2021, but the case was declined due to ex-Dist. Atty. George Gascón’s blanket ban on charging certain misdemeanors.

Under the county’s bail schedule, Pearce probably wouldn’t have been jailed even if he had been charged. It was not clear what drug Pearce was accused of possessing, and Beverly Hills police ignored numerous requests for comment.

Informed of the district attorney’s office’s past decisions not to charge Pearce, Allison expressed frustration that it was the latest instance in a lifetime of her younger brother avoiding consequences. She thinks it emboldened him.

“If you get away with something over and over, you keep doing it,” she said.

Times staff writer Matthew Ormseth contributed to this report.