Follow our live coverage for the latest news on the coronavirus pandemic. The night the Santa Paula fires ripped through the canyon towards Ventura, propelled by winds of 80 kilometres per hour, Mercedes Grabowski was found dead in a park in nearby Camarillo. The porn actress, known professionally as August Ames, had been caught up in a firestorm of a different kind. After tweeting that she would not work with a "crossover" co-star who had filmed gay scenes, the wrath of the porn industry and Twitter at large descended upon her.
After her death, the wind would change direction, and others stood in its path: gay porn star Jaxton Wheeler, who had said August should take a cyanide pill; veteran actress Jessica Drake, whose more oblique tweets were framed as cyberbullying; and August's husband, porn producer Kevin Moore. August is the subject of a new audiobook, The Last Days of August.
It's an investigation by journalist Jon Ronson and producer Lina Misitzis, combining two of Ronson's previous interests — internet pile-ons, the subject of his book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed , and the tech takeover of the porn industry, which he explores in The Butterfly Effect, an audiobook he made with Misitzis.
But that would change. His plan for The Last Days of August had been to interview the people who Twitter-shamed the actress and find out what led them to that moment.
Instead, he found himself burdened with a huge sense of responsibility — first to August, but also to the grieving husband, Moore, around whom terrible rumours were circulating. There was speculation among his interviewees that Moore had murdered his wife — based largely on the fact that one of his exes had overdosed and another, also in the porn industry, was institutionalised. It moved Ronson to break from his narrator role and address the listener directly.
