On the night of December 5, 2017, while wildfires raged in Ventura County, a twenty-three year-old adult film actress named August Ames (real name: Mercedes Grabowski) hanged herself in a public park in Camarillo, California. Ames’s death and the murky underworld of the porn business are the subject of Jon Ronson’s interesting, if somewhat unsatisfying podcast The Last Days of August.
Ronson, whose 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed examined what happens when public figures are roasted online for their misdeeds is an apt narrator for a story that starts as an extreme example of that phenomenon. At the time of Ames’s death, reporting suggested she was driven to take her own life because of online bullying she experienced when she tweeted that she had refused to partake in a sex scene with a male partner who also shot gay porn. One reply to her tweet that drew particular attention after she died was one that told her, in so many words, to go kill herself. But Ronson is after more than just a tidy rumination on the evils of online bullying because he tells us early on that the pointed-to tweet was sent after she was dead - she never saw it.
With this reveal (which occurs early in the second of the show’s seven episodes) behind him, Ronson delves into Ames’s backstory, finding the people in her life - her brother, her husband, her close friends - and others in the world of adult entertainment to try and untangle things. And to his credit, Ronson does yeoman’s work. He is cursed at, insulted, hung up on, and dismissed. His interviewees toggle between friendliness and undisguised animosity. But each also has an agenda, and as they all admit, the industry they work in is full of hustlers and liars. All of which makes them unreliable narrators and separating truth from fiction an almost impossible task.
Ames’s husband Kevin is eyed with suspicion as a controlling misanthrope who Ames was ready to leave and whose behavior the night she died (and his description of the events) seemed rehearsed and unemotional. Kevin, on the other hand, lays blame at the feet of another actress, Jessica Drake, who helped lead the online pile on after Ames’s initial tweet. Ames’s own mental health problems, stemming from childhood molestation and including at least one prior suicide attempt, are also considered, as is the negative effect a scene she shot shortly before her death had on her. Her male partner, a porn actor named Marcus Dupree, it was suggested, was overly rough with her, veering toward (if not across) the blurry line of consent that exists in the industry.
The best Ronson can do is compare stories and, where it is available, look to objective evidence to figure out where the truth lies. For example, he does identify some minor discrepancies in Kevin’s story of the night August died, like when the power went out at their home (which he explains, is the reason he stayed at a hotel almost 20 miles away while she was still missing). More importantly, Ronson views the unedited scene Ames shot shortly before her death with Dupree who, Ames claimed, went beyond her consent, roughed her up, and basically made her feel like she had been raped. The scene plays out in some respects just as Ames had described it contemporaneously to a friend named Ryan, but in other respects cannot be verified.
Similarly, Ryan tells an entirely different story than Kevin about Ames’s prior suicide attempt - Ryan said Kevin did not show up to the hospital for seven hours, Kevin said he was with doctors during that time. Kevin claimed Ryan and August were not friends and that she changed her phone number after she was released to avoid people like him. Ryan shows that he had her new number. But while this information is helpful, it does little to answer the underlying question of why Ames ultimately decided to take her own life. Instead, it reinforces the unreliability of the people telling the story, leaving listeners to draw their own conclusions.
Last Days also searches for, as is understandable when someone takes her own life, alternate explanations. Some people Ronson speaks with speculate that Ames would have been unable to climb the tree she was found hanging from. There are also suggestions that Kevin’s overbearing personality drove her to kill herself. But again, the objective facts (to the extent they exist) elide neat conclusions. A pathologist who reviews Ames’s autopsy finds no sign of foul play and opines that Ames’s decision to hang herself in a public park was likely the result of not wanting a loved one to find her. The one clue Ronson cannot unearth is Ames’s suicide note, which remains in her widowed husband’s possession but which he will not reveal the full contents of. Meanwhile, he acknowledges the flaws in their marriage but disclaims any responsibility for the mental state she was in when she died.
And therein lies the limitation of Last Days. There is a lot of smoke but no fire. When word gets out that Ronson is sniffing around the story of Ames’s suicide, he gets a nasty talking to from a woman named Lisa Ann, a well-known actress who berates him for causing trouble. Others rise to defend Marcus Dupree, the man whose rough scene with Ames is viewed as a triggering cause for her decision to take her own life. Still others come to Kevin’s defense, indicating that there was love between he and Ames even though, like many married couples (forget ones who work in porn) they had their difficulties. The industry is revealed as cliquish and quick to defend itself but there is just not the evidence to lay blame on it or any one person within it for Ames’s suicide. If anything, the series argues for greater access to mental health treatment for adult performers, because Ames was one of several women who died just that year from suicide or drug overdose.
There is also an overarching theme of how older men in the adult industry prey on young, vulnerable women. The cliches practically write themselves, but Ronson is not above driving the point home - lots of young women with daddy issues end up being ill served by men much older than them who lack the maturity to do anything other than use these women for their own gratification and then shrug their shoulders when things go south and they are unable to cope with it.
In the end, we are left with a sort of Murder on the Orient Express type of solution. No one person was responsible for Ames’s death but the contributing factors - social media, online bullying, mental illness, a lack of emotional support - all came together at a time when Ames felt particularly vulnerable and did not think there was any way out other than to take her own life.
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