Girl 27

It was 1937 when Patricia Douglas was brutally raped at an MGM studio party.



She was part of a group of 100 chorus girls for MGM who were called for what they believed was a film shoot, outfitted in skimpy cowgirl outfits, and lined up to await the flood of MGM salesmen on a hospitality weekend for which they had been promised that anything they wanted was available to them, anything at all. Many of the girls were teenagers. Patricia Douglas was 20 years old, a virgin who didn’t drink, but who loved to dance. She wasn’t interested in wild partying, or in the open bar.

And she certainly wasn’t interested in any of the groping, lecherous MGM employees primed to treat the pretty young ladies as party favors. The party was soon out of control; women appealed to waiters and male bathroom attendants to help them fend off unwelcome advances, and David Ross and another man held Patricia Douglas’s nose and poured a glass of scotch and champagne into her mouth. When she ran outside to vomit, David Ross followed.

There he raped her in a parked car, slapping her throughout to keep her from blacking out. A parking attendant finally heard her screams and saw Ross run away, a testimony he made and later rescinded in exchange for a lifetime job at MGM. Douglas was taken away in an ambulance, to be treated by an MGM doctor who gave her a cold-water douche to wash away the evidence. When she made the anachronistically gusty move to press charges, her lawyer failed to show up in court on three separate occasions. Newspapers trashed her as a tramp and a liar, and published her real name, photographs, and address while identifying MGM only as a “local film studio.”





At the grand jury hearing, Patricia Douglas sat in the court room while Ross’s lawyer addressed the jury, saying "Look at her. Who would want her?" MGM even bought off her own mother, acting as court-appointed legal guardian to a minor. Douglas’s rapist went free and the whole story faded into obscurity.

This is the story that documentarian David Stenn unearths through archival footage, documents, and interviews with those involved and their children in his recently-released on DVD documentary Girl 27 (a reference to Douglas’s number on the girls’ call sheet).



I watched it over the weekend, and while Stenn’s approach has rightfully been called a bit self-indulgent (he features himself largely in the film and likes to name-drop Jacqueline Onassis) I found Douglas’s story compelling enough that it didn’t bother me. When Stenn locates her (now an elderly recluse who describes herself as “frigid”), it becomes chillingly clear that even 65 years later, the unpunished assault is still happening to Douglas, and just how much that spring night in 1937 affected the course of her life.

IMDB page for Girl 27
Vanity Fair article