August Ames
Hilary Rivera was as proud as some other mom can be of her daughter Mercedes Grabowski as she left her native Nova Scotia, Canada, on the age of 19 with hopes of discovering stardom in Los Angeles. And, inside months of touchdown in Hollywood, the “free spirit,” as Rivera describes her eldest daughter, managed to make a reputation—properly, a brand new identify—for herself: August Ames.
Not like some dad and mom whose youngsters enter the grownup leisure trade, Rivera was totally supportive of Ames’ profession, turning into her greatest cheerleader and all the time wanting to gossip together with her about bumping into Kim Kardashian in a rest room or chat about attending a celebration held at Charlie Sheen’s home. Actually, the mom of 4’s solely qualm was the almost 6,000-mile distance Ames’ new profession put between the pair.
“I needed the very best for her; I needed her to meet her goals, and I needed her to be comfortable,” Rivera informed The Day by day Beast, following the discharge of her new e-book Porn Star Mother: My Life with August Ames. “I used to be thrilled for her that she was getting these alternatives to satisfy well-known folks and to reside in a fantastic neighborhood and to be a star. It was one thing that I had by no means fathomed might probably occur to her.”
However now, almost a decade after Ames determined to depart residence, Rivera needs that she had had higher perception into what her eldest daughter was going by. She says she’s come to study that Ames was deeply depressed and allegedly emotionally uncared for by her husband Kevin Moore, a producer and director for the grownup firm Evil Angel.
Rivera was additionally sickened to find that Ames, regardless of being one of many trade’s greatest rising stars, that includes in near 300 motion pictures over her five-year profession, felt unable to face up for herself towards a few of her co-stars who allegedly crossed a line throughout shoots—particularly Russian performer Markus Dupree, whom Ames accused of creating her really feel violated after certainly one of their scenes.
“She was simply on cloud 9,” Rivera remembers of Ames after her arrival in California. “After which over time, issues occurred, and she or he was compelled into conditions the place she was very poorly handled—past poorly handled. She was manhandled by her co-star, [Dupree] roughed her up. He left marks on her so badly that she couldn’t work for a few weeks.”
Performers ignoring Ames’ boundaries and the crew allegedly failing to intervene when Ames was in misery will need to have been triggering for her, Rivera believes, referencing how Ames had confided in her that she had been sexually abused as a baby by a member of the family.
“Regardless that she was such a giant star, she deep down didn’t really feel that means,” Rivera says. “She felt helpless, and by the hands of everybody round her.”
However Rivera believes that Ames was lastly standing up for herself on Dec. 3, 2017, when she fired off a tweet about refusing to work with a “crossover performer.” That tweet would spark a relentless 48-hour torrent of cyberbullying that she believes finally led the 23-year-old to take her personal life. (Rivera claims in her e-book that Ames had simply discovered that her would-be co-star had refused to take an HIV take a look at, which is why she refused to shoot with him.)
“Whichever (woman) performer is changing me tomorrow for EroticaXNews, you’re capturing with a man who has shot homosexual porn, simply to let cha know,” Ames had tweeted. “BS is all I can say. Do brokers actually not care about who they’re representing? #ladirect I do my homework for my physique?”
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Nearly instantly, Ames was accused of being bigoted and homophobic, with many claiming her tweet reenforced the damaging stigma surrounding bisexual male performers—particularly, issues that they run a higher threat of passing on sexually transmitted ailments to their scene companions. Ames tried to elucidate that she wasn’t being homophobic, however relatively exercising her proper to decide on who she carried out with. “I wasn’t attacking, I used to be warning, as a result of most feminine performers I do know received’t work with crossovers,” she claimed.
Nonetheless, the backlash intensified, and the hits got here from throughout, together with from veteran performer Jessica Drake, who chastised Ames for “eliminating people based mostly on the actual fact they might have performed homosexual or crossover work,” including that her “logic is critically flawed.”
Pansexual performer Jaxton Wheeler additionally chimed in, tweeting round 6 a.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 5, “The world is awaiting your apology or so that you can swallow a cyanide tablet. Both or we’ll take it.” That very same morning, Ames’ physique was discovered. (Wheeler claims that his tweet was posted after her dying.)
Rivera accuses Wheeler of being “the catalyst” for Ames’ choice to take her life but in addition acknowledges that Ames was within the midst of a private disaster, pointing to her strained marriage to Moore, a basic lack of assist from throughout the trade, her mental-health struggles, and at last, the social media pile-on.
“There was a complete chain of occasions that culminated in her taking her life,” she says.
Whereas Wheeler went on an apology tour of types after Ames’ passing, with many pointing the finger at him for encouraging Ames to take her life, Rivera says that she has by no means acquired a direct apology from Wheeler.
“I’ve by no means spoken to that man, nor do I wish to,” she says. “If somebody’s gonna say publicly, ‘Why don’t you're taking a cyanide tablet?’ that sort of character isn’t the kind of character that’s going to say, ‘Oh, gee, I’m actually sorry. I didn’t imply on your daughter to take her life.’ No, it doesn’t compute.”
Nonetheless, Rivera says that she’s pleased with her daughter “though it precipitated such a storm in her life.”
“A minimum of she was standing up for herself,” Rivera writes. “I suppose that was the final time she ever actually put her personal wants and needs above anybody else’s.”
Rivera additionally expressed anger towards Ames’ husband Moore, who she claims Ames solely married as a result of she wanted a inexperienced card to remain working within the U.S. Whereas Rivera says Moore, who was considerably older, was comfortable to have the twenty-something function his arm sweet, he failed to supply her with much-needed emotional assist.
Ames had battled despair since she was a baby, Rivera says, recalling how she acknowledged early indicators when Ames was a younger lady. (Solely later would Ames inform her mom that she had been molested by a member of the family.) Later in life, Ames was additionally identified with bipolar affective dysfunction, one thing that Rivera additionally battles.
“I feel [Moore] is only a narcissist who doesn’t really feel that he has performed any improper,” Rivera says, claiming that he was emotionally abusive and uncared for Ames. “Neglect is nearly as dangerous as abuse. She was left to her personal units on a regular basis. Apart from the porn trade, they didn’t have something in frequent. Definitely, the generational hole didn’t assist.”
Moore himself admits that he might have performed a greater job of listening to Ames’ fragile state, telling journalist Jon Ronson in his 2019 Audible podcast The Final Days of August that he was going by his personal emotional disaster shortly earlier than her passing because of the dying of their cat Kush.
“I withdrew from life, and I withdrew from [Ames],” he mentioned. “I simply wasn’t there. I’d sit there and take a look at photographs of Kush. It’s so unhappy. She talked to her therapist about it, that she didn’t know what to do for me. I didn’t know she’d be useless six weeks later.”
It was round this identical time that Ames partook in what would flip right into a traumatic capturing expertise for her with Markus Dupree, who has a repute within the trade for being significantly tough and crossing boundaries along with his scene companions.
Ronson beforehand spoke to The Day by day Beast in 2019, recalling how he was proven the scene—which has by no means been launched—in query. “You'll be able to’t shake the sensation that that’s the second it begins,” he mentioned.
“It clearly triggered in her issues that she’d skilled as a baby and she or he simply appeared so upset in that second, and it’s actually exhausting to shake that feeling. I’m not going to say that’s the rationale she died however that was the start of the top.”
In 2019, Ames’ pal Emma Hix launched a collection of textual content messages that Ames reportedly wrote after her scene with Dupree, describing that he was “means too tough” and the scene “felt like rape.”
“Yesterday was completely unprofessional and I needed to die,” the textual content learn. “He was dragging me round and choked me with my panties, slamming my head down on the desk and was simply WAY too tough and the scene didn’t even name for it.”
“No one on set mentioned shit and I used to be actually in panic mode, so I froze and didn’t say no or cease. I simply needed it to be over,” she added in a follow-up message. “I used to be wanting on the sound man with ‘assist me’ eyes and he was wanting again with ‘I’m sorry’ eyes.”
Grownup movie actress August Ames and grownup movie producer Kevin Moore attend the 2016 AVN Awards on the Exhausting Rock Lodge & On line casino on January 23, 2016, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
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For Rivera, it’s heartbreaking to know that her daughter had not one single advocate in that room. She wonders why there can’t be intimacy coordinators on all grownup movie units in the identical method as Hollywood productions.
“It might be frequent sense to have somebody on set saying [stop],” she says. “Or a director for heaven’s sakes. Wouldn’t you anticipate the director to say ‘reduce’ if one of many forged members is in bodily and visual ache?”
It took years for Rivera to try to come to phrases with what occurred, one thing she’s at present fighting. Via tears she admits that she, partially, blames herself for Ames’ dying, largely as a consequence of what certainly one of Ames’ shut associates had relayed to her.
The pal had gone to go to a medium to achieve some closure following Ames’ passing, holding out hope that the medium might make contact with Ames. Rivera discovered from the pal that, in keeping with the medium, Ames’ final phrases had been “liquid braveness”—which made Rivera’s abdomen drop.
Throughout Ames’ upbringing, Rivera admits that she battled alcohol habit and would usually repeat that precise phrase whereas consuming. Listening to it repeated again to her was devastating.
“It made me really feel accountable as a result of these had been my phrases,” Rivera says. “I used to be a raging functioning alcoholic, and I didn’t comprehend it. I didn’t acknowledge it, however everybody round me knew it. Definitely, my youngsters who had been youngsters on the time noticed it. Alcohol was such a strong drug for me, that’s all I needed. I used to be exhausted on the finish of the day, and I nonetheless needed to put supper on the desk. Alcohol was a means for me to loosen up and let go.”
“Simply realizing that these might have been her final ideas, it simply breaks my coronary heart that she wanted that,” Rivera provides. “Figuring out that I had that a lot affect over my daughter was a very exhausting tablet to swallow for me. That’s why I take a lot of the blame for what she did.”
There are a large number of issues Rivera needs she might return and alter. For starters, she needs that she might have had a extra trustworthy and open dialog with Ames as a younger lady about talking up when she was uncomfortable.
Rivera explains that she too was sexually assaulted whereas rising up and as a younger girl, and it took till Ames’ dying to sort out these powerful conversations head-on.
“She and I had very related experiences,” Rivera says. “I wasn’t closed off from her however closed off from every little thing that I simply didn’t know deal with the state of affairs. I didn’t know discuss to her about it. I’m a special mom immediately than I used to be once I was elevating my first three youngsters. I’m elevating [my daughter] Ursula now who's 14 and belief me, I'm not the identical mom.”
Rivera hopes that her e-book will assist result in additional assist—psychological well being sources and on-set intimacy coordinators—for grownup performers, and encourage dad and mom to have troublesome conversations with their youngsters and cherish each second with them.
“Dad and mom must know that they're such large influences on their youngsters,” Rivera says. “What you say to your baby can’t be unsaid—or what you don’t say. I do know this personally… as a result of she’s not right here anymore.”