Read story transcript. A little more than a year ago, Mercedes Grabowski, a Canadian porn star who performed under the name August Ames, took her own life. Since then, writer and broadcaster Jon Ronson has been trying to find out why. There was a lot of activity on August Ames's Twitter the day she died. Her feed was inundated with responses to a remark she posted about refusing to film a scene with a male actor who had previously performed in same-sex porn.
Here is part of his conversation with As it Happens host Carol Off. Initially, the story about August's death was a story about Twitter bullying. August's husband Kevin [Moore] had put out a statement saying that he blamed Twitter bullying for her death. Because I'd written about online shaming , and spent a year in the porn world for this show I'd made, The Butterfly Effect , it seemed that I was kind of uniquely qualified to tell this story.
So I had an idea for the story, which completely changed β almost immediately β because so many unexpected twists and turns occurred. She'd been booked to shoot a sex scene with a company called Erotica X and she didn't recognize the name of her scene partner.
And so she looked him up, and saw that he'd done gay work, and said she didn't want to work with him because of the possibility that he may have HIV. So she tweeted that, and a lot of gay performers were upset. And they told her so in very reasonable terms. August Ames's husband, Kevin Moore β when you spoke with him β made it very clear to you why his wife had taken her own life, in his view.
He laid particular blame on a famous porn star called Jessica Drake, who had tweeted things about August that day. And he said that one of the last things August said when she left her house to kill herself was, "Jessica Drake hates me. He had also written a statement, which he was going to release straight after I interviewed him. And in the statement, he was going to name names. It was going to be like throwing a hand grenade into the porn industry: "These are the people who contributed to my wife's death" β the people who had piled in on August on Twitter.
