When David Pearce found two women unconscious in his apartment around 5 a.m., their prone forms near empty liquor bottles and a powdery substance, he said, at first he didn’t think much of it.
“The lifestyle that I was living at the time was not very conducive to regular behavior, if that makes sense,” Pearce, 42, testified in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom Tuesday. “It was not uncommon for people to use my house as a crash pad, a party house. I know it’s horrible, but at least on a weekly basis friends were passing out at my house.”
Pearce, a self-described “entertainment professional,” is on trial for rape and murder. The people knocked out in his living room — Christy Giles, Hilda Marcela Cabrales Arzola and Michael Ansbach — had all gone out with Pearce and his roommate, Brandt Osborn, for a November 2021 night at a warehouse rave that involved heavy cocaine use. Pearce said he helped the unconscious women to bed, placing them on their sides with water and a trash can in case they needed to vomit, then went to sleep.
Nearly 12 hours went by. Neither woman woke up. Pearce said he grew concerned and repeatedly checked on them, eventually taking Giles to an area hospital. When he got back to his Olympic Boulevard apartment, Arzola was still unconscious. Pearce said he started administering CPR, but at no point did he call 911.
“She was responding to the chest compressions. She was responding to the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in a positive way,” he said. “I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know how much drugs they did.”
Against the advice of his attorney, Pearce took the stand in his own defense this week. Prosecutors have accused Pearce of providing fatal doses of narcotics to both women, then failing to get them proper medical aid. He painted himself as a concerned party who did his best to aid two women he barely knew.
Pearce was arrested in Giles’ and Arzola’s deaths in December 2021 alongside Osborn and Ansbach. Since then, seven women have come forward to accuse Pearce of raping them. Osborn is charged as an accomplice to Giles’ and Arzola’s deaths, while Ansbach has become a crucial witness for the prosecution.
In testimony that spanned two days, Pearce denied each rape accusation, saying he’d never met at least one of his accusers and dismissing the rest of the encounters as consensual. Pearce described a booze- and drug-fueled lifestyle and said most of the women came on to him at parties or through dating apps.
Prosecutors have offered a wildly different account, alleging Pearce posed as a well-connected Hollywood player who lured women back to his apartment by posing as someone who could help with their acting, modeling or music aspirations. Several women alleged they became sick or paralyzed after Pearce served them a drink. A toxicology screen revealed Giles had the date- rape drug GHB in her system after leaving Pearce’s home.
On the night prosecutors say Pearce served Giles and Arzola a deadly batch of cocaine, Pearce said, he met them in a “drug room” at the rave.
“People were chopping up drugs, doing bumps, exchanging or handing drugs to each other. … It was clearly designated as the area where people were getting high,” Pearce said.
Eventually the group went back to Pearce’s apartment, where Ansbach testified Pearce pulled out a batch of cocaine that burned his nose and left him feeling so ill he ate charcoal tablets to induce vomiting and rid his body of the substance the next day. Giles and Arzola did lines from the same batch and never recovered, Ansbach testified.
Pearce discounted Ansbach’s version of events on the stand, saying he didn’t provide the women or Ansbach any drugs in his apartment. Court records show Giles and Arzola also had some of their own narcotics in their possession at the rave.
Attorneys typically try to keep their clients from testifying in order to protect them from direct questioning by prosecutors. On Tuesday afternoon, Pearce found himself interrogated by Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Seth Carmack, who was quick to call into question the defendant’s credibility.
After Pearce testified he’d “never met” one of his accusers and wasn’t even living at his Olympic Boulevard apartment where she alleged he raped her in 2010, Carmack produced lease agreements and police reports in which Pearce listed that residence as his home address as far back as 2009. The question left Pearce reeling, babbling out a reply that his laptop had automatically switched in an incorrect address on documents he’d uploaded.
Carmack also repeatedly hammered Pearce for failing to call 911 at even as Arzola had been unconscious for more than 12 hours at his apartment. Pearce said he wasn’t sure how sick they were and previously had problems with delays when calling 911 for people sick at his house.
Ansbach, however, testified last week that Pearce was trying to discourage anyone from taking the women to a hospital because he was worried about his own criminal liability. Videos from two hospitals also show Pearce’s car did not have its license plates attached when he drove the women to the medical facilities.
Closing arguments in the two-week trial are expected to begin Wednesday.
