“We’d found a porn world that acted like a family. We left it in the summer of 2017, when our reporting was done. Six months later something terrible happened.”
That’s how author and journalist Jon Ronson (So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed) sets the narrative stage for The Last Days of August, a new Audible documentary podcast wherein he and Lina Misitzis explore what led to the suicide of acclaimed adult film star August Ames in late 2017.
The title, however, is a little misleading—it’s not really about the last days leading up to August Ames’ death; it’s an amalgam of the life August led and an investigation into what led her to commit suicide.
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Measured and melodic, Ronson’s words tug at the frayed edges of a scab newly formed. This is not a murder mystery, he cautions, and yet a year later it’s his investigation into her death that’s generating similar headlines all over again.
Thanks to the success of their earlier porn-world podcast, The Butterfly Effect, Ronson and Misitzis were able to effectively navigate some of the more sensitive topics within the XXX community.
“I work a lot, so in my free time I really just chill out. I have my two cats, Kush and Ninja, I shop at Target, I’m normal, you know,” Ames describes herself in the podcast’s first chapter, her voice bubbly and full of energy.
Seven chapters later, her husband, adult director Kevin Moore, reveals the emotional despair he faced when their cat Kush had to be put down, and how that impacted Ames (who he refers to as Mercedes, her birth name). Moore seems to blame himself for mourning. “I withdrew from life and I withdrew from Mercedes. I just wasn’t there. I’d sit there and look at photos of Kush,” says Moore. “It’s so sad. She talked to her therapist about it, that she didn’t know what to do for me. I didn’t know she’d be dead six weeks later.”
Moore’s observation of six weeks is interesting here, because it was also about six weeks between the time Ames filmed a porn scene with performer Markus Dupree and when she died. Despite Ronson’s opinion that the story isn’t about blame or the responsibility of any one person, there’s a lot of finger-pointing happening in The Last Days of August.
“When Lina and I watched the Las Vegas video [with Dupree], and watched August sign out at the end, you can’t shake the feeling that that’s the moment it begins,” Ronson tells The Daily Beast. “It obviously triggered in her things that she’d experienced as a child and she just looked so upset in that moment, and it’s really hard to shake that feeling. I’m not going to say that’s the reason she died but that was the beginning of the end.”
Aside from anyone on set that day, only Ronson and Misitzis have witnessed the scene Ames shot with Dupree. The large, well-known adult film company based in Las Vegas that produced it—rumored to be Brazzers—has not released the scene, however screened it for the two journalists. It was a scene Ames called “unprofessional” and regretted doing, a scene she wished she’d spoken up in, a scene that she says left her covered in bruises. But was it this scene that led her to her death?
A month after Ames’ suicide, Moore was vehement about what killed his wife: cyberbullying, in the wake of her tweet two days before her death about not wanting to shoot scenes with men who’ve shot “gay porn,” for health reasons. “If she hadn’t been bullied she’d be alive right now,” Moore says in the docuseries, pointing out the 24-hour time frame from the intense backlash to her post on Twitter to her suicide.
Moore never mentioned a scene gone wrong or Dupree, though he’d been aware of it. Ames was certainly unhappy about the scene and had texted the director afterwards to say “that wasn’t cool,” which has lead to speculation about what part the director played on set that day.
In recently-posted text messages between Ames and her pal Emma Hix, Ames allegedly wrote, “Yesterday was totally unprofessional and I wanted to die.”
“[Dupree] was way too rough with me. He was dragging me around and choked me with my panties, slamming my head down on the table and was just WAY too rough and the scene didn’t even call for it,” she wrote. “I was so enraged that when he pulled me down to kiss him I just spat in his face… I was literally in panic mode so I froze and didn’t say no or stop. I just wanted it to be over.”
“It felt like rape.”
When questioned about the identity of the director of the Ames/Dupree scene, Ronson deflects and says, “I’m happy to answer any question that you ask but that’s one question I can’t really answer.” Misitzis chimes in about the “terms of anonymity.”
“It’s not about blaming people,” adds Ronson. “It’s about trying to understand what happened.”
Regardless of who makes a better villain, this was not Ames’ first suicide attempt. Ronson briefly mentions an unsuccessful attempt in May of that year, for which Ames was admitted into the hospital six months before filming the scene with Dupree. When asked if Ames had other previous suicide attempts that the journalists were aware of, Misitzis says “she had a couple.” Ronson concurs.
What porn and cyberbullying, which is where this docuseries begins, have to do with the tragedy of August Ames seem far less relevant than a story about how we as a society recognize and respond to mental illness.
