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-In February 1929, Joe Kennedy made an offer to buy the Pantages theater chain, the second biggest in California, from its owner Alexander Pantages, a Greek immigrant who had built the chain from scratch into a multi-million dollar business.
-Joe's innate arrogance was now rampant, and when Pantages rebuffed his offers, Kennedy threatened him by boasting of his influence in the banking and movie businesses. Soon, Pantages found his theaters were being denied first-run blockbuster features from major studios, but that was only the beginning.

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-On August 9,1929 in Pantages's flagship theater, the Beaux Arts in downtown Los Angeles, an hysterical lady in red emerged from the janitor's broom closet on the mezzanine screaming: "There he is, the Beast! Don't let him get at me!" She pointed to the silver-haired Alexander Pantages in the office next to the broom closet.
- The girl, Eunice Pringle of Garden Grove, California, told police that she had come to Pantages looking for work as a dancer. Instead of offering her a job, he had pushed her into the broom closet, wrenched her underwear loose and raped her. Pantages insisted that he was being framed, and that the young woman had torn and ripped her own clothing.
- Poor Pantages was convicted and sentenced to fifty years, but the verdict was overturned on appeal, on the basis that it was prejudicial to Pantages to exclude testimony about the morals of the plaintiff. The court found her testimony "so improbable as to challenge credulity."
-At the new trial, Pantages' lawyers reenacted the alleged rape and showed that it could not have occurred in the small broom closet the way Pringle had described it. The jury was also shown how athletic Pringle was, casting doubt on her claim that she could not fight off advances by the slightly built Pantages.
- The second jury acquitted Pantages, but because of the notoriety, his business had plummeted. A few months after Kennedy's final offer of $8 million, Pantages was forced to sell out to Joe's RKO for $3.5 million.