August Ames — Bodily Autonomy

The Fires of History — Episode 31

A bisexual woman declined a scene with a specific co-worker on industry-standard testing grounds. The mob decided that was homophobia. A stranger told her to take a cyanide pill. Two days later she was dead. She was twenty-three.

The Performer

August Ames was the stage name of Mercedes Grabowski. She was 23 years old, Canadian-born, and had been working in the adult industry since 2013. She had won or been nominated for multiple AVN Awards. By the industry’s own standards, successful.

She identified as bisexual. This matters because the accusation that killed her was that she was a homophobe.

The Tweet

On December 3, 2017, Ames posted on Twitter:

“whichever (lady) performer is replacing me tomorrow for @EroticaXNews, you’re shooting with a guy who has shot gay porn, just to let cha know. BS is all I can say. Do agents really not care about who they are representing? #ladrieschoice”

The context, which almost nobody bothered to learn before responding: the adult film industry runs two largely separate testing regimes. Straight and gay productions have different STI testing protocols and different testing frequencies. Performers in the straight side of the industry had for years raised concerns about crossover performers — male performers working in both straight and gay productions — because the testing gap represents a real occupational health risk.

This was not Ames’s personal opinion. It was an industry concern discussed openly for years. Free Speech Coalition, the industry trade group, acknowledged the testing discrepancies. Performers of all orientations had raised it.

Ames was asserting a right that should be self-evident: the right to decide who you will and will not have sex with, professionally, based on your own risk assessment.

The Dogpile

Twitter read the tweet as homophobia. The response was immediate, massive, and vicious.

Jaxton Wheeler, a male adult performer, replied: “take a cyanide pill.”

Other responses told her to kill herself, called her a bigot, a homophobe, trash, a disgrace. Thousands of strangers — most of whom had never worked in the adult industry and had no understanding of its testing protocols — decided that a bisexual woman declining sex with a specific person for specific safety reasons was an act of bigotry.

Ames responded to some of the attacks. She tried to explain the testing issue. She pointed out that she was bisexual. Nobody cared. The mob had its reading and it was sticking with it.

December 5, 2017

Two days after the tweet. Mercedes Grabowski was found dead by suicide at her home in Camarillo, California. She was 23.

The Investigation

Jon Ronson, who had written the book on public shaming, investigated Ames’s death for his podcast The Last Days of August (2019). What he found was more complicated than a simple cause-and-effect narrative, and more damning of everyone in the chain.

Ames had a history of childhood sexual abuse, which she had spoken about publicly. She had struggled with substance abuse. Her marriage was under strain. She experienced social isolation within the industry. The Twitter pile-on was not the only factor in her death.

It was the precipitating event. Ronson’s investigation made clear that the mob hit a person who was already fragile — and nobody in the mob knew or cared, because the mob doesn’t do intake assessments. It does punishment.

The people who told a stranger to eat cyanide did not know she had been sexually abused as a child. They did not know she was struggling. They did not ask. They saw a tweet they didn’t like and they responded with maximum force because maximum force is the only force the mob knows how to apply.

Zero Accountability

Jaxton Wheeler deleted his cyanide tweet after Ames’s death and posted a non-apology. He faced no professional consequences. He continued working in the industry.

No one who told Ames to kill herself faced consequences of any kind. Twitter suspended no accounts. No charges were filed. No civil suits were brought. The people who pushed a 23-year-old toward death over a tweet about testing protocols walked away clean.

A woman who asserted bodily autonomy over who she would have sex with is dead. The people who told her to die are fine.

The Industry Response

The adult industry’s response split. Some performers defended Ames’s right to choose her scene partners for any reason. Others maintained that her tweet was discriminatory. Free Speech Coalition issued a statement about performer choice but stopped short of directly addressing the bullying that preceded her death.

Ames’s husband, Kevin Moore (also an adult film director), publicly blamed the cyberbullying. He was not wrong. Ronson’s investigation revealed that the marriage itself was part of the web of pressures bearing down on her.

None of which changes the central fact: a mob told a woman to kill herself, and she did.

Why This Matters

The Ames case is where the mob’s machinery produced an irreversible outcome. The mechanism — amplification, decontextualization, pile-on, punishment — is identical to every other Twitter shaming in this series. The result is calibrated to the vulnerability of the target. The mob has no way to assess that vulnerability and no interest in trying.

The particular cruelty of the Ames case is that the people who called her a homophobe believed they were defending LGBTQ rights. They were so certain of their moral position that they told a bisexual woman to eat cyanide for asserting control over who she would have sex with. People claiming to defend sexual autonomy attacked a woman for exercising sexual autonomy.

This is the pattern the Fires series tracks across centuries. The mob always believes it is righteous. The Inquisitor believes he is saving souls. The witch-hunter believes he is protecting the community. The Twitter activist believes he is fighting bigotry. The conviction of righteousness is what makes the punishment limitless. When you believe you are fighting evil, there is no such thing as disproportionate force.

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