Jon Ronson, the creator of Audible Original The Butterfly Effect, delves into the pornography industry again as he unravels the never-before-told story of what caused a beloved 23-year-old actress’s untimely death. In December 2017, famed adult film star August Ames died by suicide in a park in the Conejo Valley. Her death came just a day after she’d been the victim of a social media pile-on by fellow porn professionals—punishment for her tweeting out something deemed homophobic. A month later, August’s husband and pornography producer Kevin Moore connected with journalist Jon Ronson to tell the story of how cyberbullying via Twitter killed his wife. Neither of them could predict the rumors and secrets that Ronson would soon hear, revelations that hinted at a very different story—something mysterious and unexpected and terrible.
The last days of August contained some explicit and upsetting material involving sexuality, assault, and self harm.
It may not be suitable for all audiences.
I feel that we should kind of.
Get to know you more.
Like, you're still this sort of slightly distant figure in this story, so I really wanted to sort of.
You have a distant figure, period.
A distant person.
Yeah, I'm a loner.
I've been that way my whole life.
I, um.
I don't know.
I don't really like people.
I mean, like, this is fine.
I can have conversations with you too.
It's April 2017.
My producer Lena and I are sitting in Kevin's apartment out in Camarillo talking about his childhood and his life in porn, which began in 1996, the year he graduated college at, uh, UMass Amherst.
He created a website called Nina's World, which was a live stream of his then girlfriend stripping.
Oh, wow.
You guys found that.
Holy shit.