Author of Book on Cyberbullying Talks About Online Shaming and Adult Actress August Ames
“It feels like an earthquake.”
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Adult film star August Ames, 23, committed suicide by hanging on December 5th. Many in the porn community pointed to a uniquely 21st century cause: Online bullying over comments she’d made about refusing to work with male actors who did crossover work between gay and straight films.
Ames had a history of depression, so some might think it a stretch to lay the blame for her death entirely on internet mobs slamming her as a homophobe.
Author Jon Ronson, who wrote a book about cyberbullying titled So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, issued a tweet storm about Ames’s death that illustrated just how brutal an internet dogpile can be to the person at the bottom of the pile.
2. People who have experienced a pile-on know something that people who haven’t don’t know. Unless you’re a person who has a weird shame deficiency, and there aren’t many of those people about, it can be terrifying. It feels like an earthquake.
— jon ronson (@jonronson) December 8, 2017
Ronson’s book was extremely sympathetic to people he interviewed, who’d all been subject to some kind of internet bodyslam, showered with insults, threats, and other forms of harassment.
Ironically, that led to attacks on him as well.
Especially if you’re a vulnerable person to begin with. My biggest memory of when people were relentlessly going after me when Shamed came out. I mentioned how it was playing havoc with my anxiety disorder and someone tweeted: “Stop whining.”
— jon ronson (@jonronson) December 8, 2017
That was very telling. We can’t handle thinking of ourselves as bad people and so we have to think of the people we’re hurting as having no feelings.
— jon ronson (@jonronson) December 8, 2017
Another Twitter user told Ronson that people were “still gloating” about Ames’s death. Later he tweeted this powerful observation.
There have been many suicides and there will be more, because on twitter we are still babies with guns.
— jon ronson (@jonronson) December 8, 2017
I can’t overstate the agony of being on the end of a shaming. Unless you’re impervious – and not many people are – it is highly traumatizing. Being told to get out, that you’re garbage and you’ll be brought down…
— jon ronson (@jonronson) December 8, 2017
Ames’s friends and family continue to mourn her online. Perhaps the most poignant statement came from her brother James Grabowski, who told the Sun he wants his “sister’s death to be recognized as a serious issue–bullying is not OK…It cost me my baby sister’s life.”
“I will do what I can be a voice for Mercedes,” Grabowski said, “but right now my family and I need to be left alone to grieve–we have lost a loved one.”
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