PARTY’S OVER FOR ‘SCUMBAG’
Inside dark nightclub life of accused murderer David Pearce
DAVID Pearce had a bad reputation way before he was arrested on charges of murdering a young model and her friend, after meeting them at a late-night rave and allegedly dumping them at two Los Angeles hospitals last November.
For one thing, Pearson called himself a “producer” although his Hollywood credits were sparse and embellished. People who know him say he was mostly a B-list nightclub and party promoter, sometimes paid to wrangle hot women and reality celebrities into clubs in LA and Las Vegas.
“He was a fake producer,” an LA nightlife scenester in LA told The Post. “He was a total scumbag cheeseball and druggie.”
Said a longtime LA nightclub doorman: “He's a con artist and a fraud. Hate him.”
As far back as 2012, Pearce was apparently such a bad boyfriend that an entire thread was devoted to him on the gossip site TheDirty.com, titled “Dave Pearce is a Bad Person.” Anonymous posters claiming to have had encounters with him over the years told similar stories: Pearce stole from them and was both emotionally and physically abusive, they alleged.
More than one post mentioned Pearce had “DRDs” — or date rape drugs.
One of the women he is charged in the murder of — Christy Giles, 24, a married model and aspiring actress — had a lethal cocktail of drugs, including the notorious date rape drug GHB, in her system at the time of her death.
“He’s a sociopath I’m pretty sure, not to mention a really good con artist,” wrote one poster of Pearce in 2012.
More than one poster said Pearce was known for grabbing a woman’s iPhone on the first date and putting “Dave My Sexy Husband” in with his number.
A female habitue of the LA club scene told The Post that Pearce was a “always creeping around clubs, restaurants, bars. He’d be hitting on girls, staring at them . . . None of the good clubs ever wanted him hanging around. I wish guys like him would get real jobs and stay away from the clubs.”
More victims?
Pearce, 40, has been jailed since December 2021 on rape charges. According to prosecutors, he allegedly sexually assaulted a woman in 2010 and raped one woman in 2019 and two more women in 2020. Among the charges against him are a count of raping an unconscious or asleep person and one count of sexual penetration for a foreign object — a wine bottle. “He frequently drugs women and sexually abuses them,” LA County Deputy District Attorney Catherine Mariano said at a January hearing. Pearce has pleaded not guilty. Last week the LA County District Attorney’s Office officially filed murder counts against him in connection with the deaths of Giles, and Hilda Marcela Cabrales-Arzola, 26, an aspiring architect who had only recently moved to the US from Mexico.
The two women's fatal odyssey began on Nov. 12 when they went to
gether to an LA art show where Giles used cocaine and ketamine and smoked marijuana, a friend told police, according to an LAPD affidavit.
Later they went to a rave held at a warehouse in an industrial area of East LA where they met up with Pearce. Police said the women left with Pearce, actor Brandt Osborn, 42, and cameraman Michael Ansbach, 47, and went back to the tiny Beverly Hills apartment Pearce shared with Osborn.
Giles’ lifeless body was dropped off outside a Culver City, Calif., hospital, on Nov. 13, 2021, by two masked men who police say were Pearce and Osborn in a Toyota Prius with no license plates.
A short time later, the same men left Cabrales-Arzola at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in West Los Angeles. She died on Nov. 24 after spending 11 days in a coma and being declared brain dead.
The LA County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office ruled the women’s deaths homicides and determined that both Giles and Cabrales-Arzola died of “multiple drug intoxication.”
Cabrales-Arzola tested positive for cocaine and ecstasy, as well as other undetermined drugs, resulting in multiple organ failures.
Pearce is also facing two counts of selling or offering to sell a controlled substance to Giles and Cabrales-Arzola.
He could face a maximum sentence of 120 years if convicted of all the charges, LA County DA George Gascón said. He is expected to plead not guilty at his arraignment July 11.
When announcing the murder charges on Monday, Gascón said that seven additional women have come forward to claim that Pearce allegedly sexually assaulted them between 2010 and 2021.
And there could be more women out there, the DA said, urging alleged any victims to come forward.
Osborn was charged as an accessory to the Giles and Cabrales-Arzola’s murders. He is currently out on bond, but a warrant has been issued for his arrest. Ansbach has not been not charged and is expected to be a witness in the case, sources said.
Osborn's older brother Ryan, who lives on Staten Island, told The Post that his brother is “a great person and he's totally innocent” but said he doesn’t know where he is and wishes he'd never left New York.
“He got into the Screen Actors Guild and did ‘Law and Order’ and some stuff here but he wanted to go to LA because he wanted to make it big,” Ryan said. “He wanted to be rich and famous but like a lot of people out in Hollywood he got spit out and stomped on.”
Pearce’s mother, Ilene, resides in Novato, Calif., and had no comment on her son's charges. A person reached at the cellphone number that his father, Dr. Michael Frederick Pearce, gives to patients of his Washington, DC, dental practice, told a Post reporter that he was not Dr. Pearce.
When The Post called back, the same person began talking with a heavy Spanish accent.
Few acquaintances from the club world in LA and Las Vegas had anything good to say about Pearce.
“He used to come to clubs. Very moochy and greasy," a former nightclub owner in Las Vegas told The Post. "He would claim he was with celebrities to get into clubs’ VIP areas. He was in my phone as ‘Annoying Dave,’ so I would know not to answer his calls.”
‘No trouble getting girls’
A nightlife executive based in LA and Las Vegas said that while Pearce was sleazy, the news of his arrest on murder charges shocked him.
“He’s not the type to get someone so f--ked up that she would literally die,” he told The Post, adding that Pearce “had no trouble getting girls . . . I can’t see him dropping off a lifeless body in a mask without a license plate on his car . . . I think he would call someone who is smart enough to figure it out for him . . . He knows too many people to do something so stupid. And I don’t think he would ever drive a Prius.”
The exec remembered Pearce as someone who could sometimes get as much as $10,000 to lure hot young women and C-list celebs into clubs in LA and Vegas.
A former Las Vegas nightclub owner said Pearce was “a huge name-dropper.”
“He’s one of these guys who would try squeezing his way into the VIP area while claiming to be with celebrities,” the man said. “He would promise to take [the celebrities] to a club and use that to get in himself. He was a huge name-dropper. He would send photos of himself squeezed in alongside [DJs] Deadmau5 or Kaskade and claim to be best friends with them.”
Pearce apparently did more than name-drop. His IMDb.com bio asserts that he got his start as an actor on “Dawson’s Creek” — although The Post could not verify this — and then became a “regular” on the spinoff “Young Americans,” which ran in 2000.
Steven Antin, creator and show-runner of “Young Americans,” told The Post last week that he did not recall Pearce and that he definitely was not a regular cast member on the show. Antin said the show was shot in Baltimore so it's possible Pearce, who grew up in Maryland, was an extra but could not be sure.
But Antin, who began his career as a child star in the 1980s, said what happened to Giles and Cabrales-Arzola is a textbook cautionary tale.
“Hollywood is a magnet for so many different kinds of people and has been for years,” Antin said.
"So many are drawn here by this crazy mania for fame and fortune and some end up in this unfortunate subculture that can eat them up. People come from places and families with good values and they lose that all here."