She looks resigned and emotional and hollow all at once. "She's staring straight into the camera, holding up her cheque for the day's work, her makeup's gone, her hair is pulled back. It raises the question as to whether consent can realistically be given when an actress's career depends on her willingness to cooperate.Īs Misitzis recounts in The Last Days of August: It's like hearing August's voice from the grave.Īt the end of her scene, August is interviewed by a crew member to establish consent for legal purposes. "If somebody doesn't want to engage with us it doesn't feel fair for us to poke around in their life," Ronson says.īut after much pushing of the production company, Ronson and Misitzis managed to watch the never-released scene. However, she backed away from her claims when her husband contacted the production company in a rage.ĭupree refused Ronson's requests for an interview. Her brother believes this triggered traumatic childhood memories and sent her spiralling.Īugust sent a girlfriend photos of her bruises and a shocking account of the scene. One key player who avoids much questioning is actor Markus Dupree, who filmed an aggressive scene with Ames months before her death.
The dynamic often leads to controlling, dysfunctional relationships, which is how many interviewees describe Moore and August's.Īnd then there were August's professional relationships. Her husband was much older, as is the case with many couples in the industry. She was also, according to old interviews, a "military brat", a "dork" who loved to shop at Target, and a victim of family child sex abuse who wound up in a group home. She had appeared in around 270 sex scenes. "I want to stop for a moment and tell you something … this will not turn out to be a murder mystery", he warns.Īugust Ames was 23 when she died on December 5, 2017. It moved Ronson to break from his narrator role and address the listener directly. 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. 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. 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. Suicide Call Back Service on 1300 659 467."I really enjoyed hanging out on porn sets it was a nice break from my stressful work," Ronson says ruefully. 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.
( Twitter) A story of 'cyber-bullying' reveals far moreĪugust is the subject of a new audiobook, The Last Days of August. This tweet from August Ames was labelled as homophobic by her fellow porn actors.