The Pleiades is the best studied open cluster in the sky. It is one of the primary open clusters used to define the "Zero Age Main Sequence", and hence it serves as a cornerstone for programs which use main-sequence fitting to derive distances. This role is called into question by the "Pleiades distance controversy" - the distance to the Pleiades from Hipparcos of about 120 pc is significantly different from the distance of 133 pc derived from other techniques. Although this amounts to a 10% difference in the distance, the resultant discrepancies as propagated into the Pleiades HR-diagram, and the necessary revisions of physical models to obtain agreement with the Hipparcos result, are quite significant. To resolve this issue we are carrying out a VLBI program to derive a new, independent trigonometric parallax distance to the Pleiades.