Jon Ronson is a British writer and broadcaster who lives in New York. He’s known for his bestselling books, including The Men Who Stare at Goats (which was made into a film), The Psychopath Test, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, as well as screenwriting (Frank, Okja) and TV and audio documentaries. In 2017, he released The Butterfly Effect, a seven-episode podcast on how free internet porn changed the adult film industry. His second podcast series, The Last Days of August, about the porn star August Ames, who killed herself in December 2017 after she was Twitter-shamed for an allegedly homophobic tweet, is out on 4 January on Audible.
What’s the premise of The Last Days of August?
The initial reason for me contacting Kevin, August’s husband, was that I’ve written about public shaming and I’ve also spent a lot of time in the porn world. August Ames’s death seemed to fall into both categories. I had a pretty clear idea – I wanted to do a story that brought August to life in a humanistic way, as well as the people who piled in on her, who took her apart on Twitter. In So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, I felt I could have spent more time on the shamers, on what was happening in their lives. But, anyway, straight away, the story changed…
Tell us about that…
The first clue was [porn star] Jaxton Wheeler, who tweeted that August should take a cyanide pill. That tweet was widely blamed after August’s death, but he said he wrote it three hours after she killed herself. And that checked out. And the second clue was Jessica Drake [also a porn star]. Kevin pinned much of the blame on Jessica and we – that’s me and my producer, Lina Misitzis – met Jessica on the 11th floor of the Hyatt hotel in Las Vegas during the adult video news awards. She was in tears. She kept dropping clues, like: “I’ve been a container of knowledge, people are coming to me with things about August and for Kevin, there’s so much I can’t say…”
It sounds like the start of a detective film…
Yes. Jessica was like the dame in a private eye’s office. It was too mysterious, she was so upset, we had to follow it up… And the podcast came from that. The podcast is us trying to figure out all the reasons why August died. It’s like An Inspector Calls, how the little things – and sometimes big things – all add up.
In the second episode, when it sounds like Kevin could be responsible for August’s death, you warn listeners that they’re not listening to a true-crime story…
I really love true-crime podcasts. One of my hobbies is listening to amateur true-crime podcasts, people with no training blundering about, making everything worse. When it came to our podcast, you could have made an argument that said that Lina and I were unsure what to think about Kevin during much of the making of the show, so we could have left the listener in the same sense of confusion. But it felt unethical. It preyed on me for weeks, and one night, I was turning it over and over in my head, and I leapt out of bed and wrote down exactly what I say in that episode. I’m glad I did. I’m so glad that my anxiety wouldn’t let me allow that uneasy feeling to go away.
Have you ever started on a story and not finished it?
Yes. I spent six months in 2006 researching the credit card industry. I wanted to do a Men Who Stare at Goats about credit cards, all the secret tricks they use to get us into debt. I did quite a few interviews but the people were boring… In The Psychopath Test, I say if you want to get away with malevolent power, just be boring, because journalists won’t be interested. My American publisher never stops telling me that if I’d written the credit-card book, it would have come out exactly when the credit crunch happened and everyone would have thought I was a wise man. But every day I sat at my desk and thought: “It’s only 10 hours before I can stop and watch TV.”
What do you think of social media?
Well, when I wrote Publicly Shamed, there was no #MeToo, no Black Lives Matter. Those more positive uses of public shaming happened after the book came out. We’re in this weird position where social media treats serious and unserious transgressors in the same way. If someone tweets slightly wrongly, uses the wrong words, they are treated with the same ferocity as someone who commits an actual crime. But all humans have shit going on. We’re not just that casual tweet, that combination of words taken out of context.
So do you prefer Instagram?
I do. It feels safer, it’s more collegiate. I lie in bed watching videos of dogs being adorable.
You’ve lived in the US for seven years; how has life changed for you?
When I first came to New York it was hard. I was lonely. If you’re naturally introverted in social situations, which I am, it doesn’t take much to stop going out and become isolated and depressed. What really changed it for me was meeting Maeve Higgins, who’s a standup, and we started curating a show in Brooklyn called I’m New Here… Gradually, I started to create a similar life to what I had in London.
So, if you’re not careful, you have extreme social anxiety…
Alison Moyet told me a story I could completely relate to. She was a massive Elvis Costello fan and she went to see him play and at the after party she said to him, her hero: “I think you’re great” and he said something like: “Did you like the show?” and she said: “It went on a bit.” She didn’t mean it – it just came out. She went home and she was so upset with herself that she developed agoraphobia and didn’t go out for years. I completely understand that.
How does Brexit look from the US?
I have to say that, now I don’t live in the UK, I’m not completely all over the Brexit situation. I could win Mastermind if my subject was Russian collusion, but it would have to be the US version. In general, people here are baffled about Brexit. Americans can’t understand why no one has worked out how to make it OK. No one seems to want it – not that no one wants Brexit, but no one wants Britain to be in this chaos, so why can’t someone just fix it?
“Just fix it” is a very American approach to life.
Well, yes, and with Trump, that’s what people are doing. There’s the Mueller inquiry.
Have you experienced antisemitism?
I’ve experienced antisemitism on social media. I think of it like this: would you go up to a Muslim and tell them that they are obliged to denounce Saudi Arabia and Isis? Or tell an Irish person that they must denounce the IRA? People use words like “forced”: Jews should be forced to denounce Israel. After the shooting in Pittsburgh [on 27 October when a gunman killed 11 people in a synagogue] someone British tweeted at me: “See, that’s antisemitism!” as though we should be grateful that we haven’t been shot. The antisemitism in the US is different in that it mostly comes from far-right groups, rather than being part of the left and the right as it is in the UK.
