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The Last Days of August · Audible

The Last Days of August: Episode Two

April 11, 2019·31 min·2 clips
August Ames's friend Emma Hicks says Kevin told her to only discuss 'fun memories' with the journalist — but she refused, saying August's eating disorder, depression, and suicidal thoughts aren't dirty little secrets.
August has been dead for two months. By February, the first explanation is starting to crack, and the porn community is passing around darker theories about what happened. Some people become amateur detectives. Yoshi Obayashi remembers texting friends after the news, half joking that Kevin had killed her, then hearing them agree. Axel Braun gets stuck on the mechanics: August's weight, the wind, the tree, and a death that does not make sense to him. Then the rumors spread. People link August's death to older stories about Kevin's partners, though the accounts are tangled and often secondhand. Ronson steps back from Kevin. For the next couple of months, the production checks the claims instead of letting suspicion settle into fact. Hunter Bryce is the first test. The record puts her engagement to Kevin in 2009, their split in 2010, and her death in 2011. It was not suicide. The finding here is an accidental overdose involving methamphetamine and ethanol, a flatter fact than the rumor wanted. Shazia Sahari is harder to find. She has left the industry, and people around it either do not know her story or cannot remember it clearly. An old recording remains. In a 2012 casting couch interview with Pierre Woodman, Shazia says she joined after graduation and chose the industry deliberately. Her own words make the rumor harder to keep simple. The episode closes with August's brother James in Hinton, Alberta, willing to talk only if the story can be told whole.

As heard by us

A measured, human look at rumor, memory, and the cost of not knowing.

The Last Days of August stays with the two months after August died, when rumor kept moving faster than certainty and the porn community started building its own version of events.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want a slow, testimony-led true crime story about rumor and uncertainty after a death, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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