Armie Hammer, photographed in Los Angeles last week.
Armie Hammer Breaks His Silence
Two years after some of the most shocking allegations of the #MeToo era lit up the Internet and destroyed his career, the actor has finally decided to tell his side of the story
BY JAMES KIRCHICK
PORTRAIT BY ANDREW GRAY MCDONNELL
FEBRUARY 4, 2023
For the vast majority of humanity, January 1, 2021—a year into the coronavirus pandemic, when most of the world remained under some form of lockdown and vaccines were not yet widely available—brought little to celebrate. Not for Armie Hammer.
The actor, great-grandson of oil tycoon Armand Hammer, had many reasons for optimism. The previous summer, Hammer and his wife of 10 years, Bird Bakery founder Elizabeth Chambers, had announced what appeared to be their amicable separation on Instagram, and over the months that followed, Hammer was photographed alongside a succession of beautiful young women.
In October, Variety reported that Hammer—first catapulted to stardom for playing the Winklevoss twins in the hit 2010 movie The Social Network—would take over for Ryan Reynolds as Jennifer Lopez’s love interest in the romantic action-comedy Shotgun Wedding. A few weeks later, he was cast as producer Al Ruddy in The Offer, a limited series about the making of The Godfather. Also on Hammer’s calendar was Gaslit, a mini-series about Watergate starring Sean Penn and Julia Roberts, in which he would play Nixon White House counsel John Dean, as well as The Minutes, on Broadway.
Hammer and his wife, Bird Bakery founder Elizabeth Chambers, in 2015. Chambers filed for divorce in the summer of 2020.
It was on the cusp of undertaking this professionally ambitious and artistically diverse slate of projects that Hammer issued a defiant message to the world via Twitter. “2021 is going to kneel down before me and kiss my feet because this year I’m the boss of my own year,” he declared.
Nine days later, Hammer’s name began trending on the social-media site. “On a global scale,” he told me late last year. “Punjabi newspapers. Things from Estonia. It was coming from everywhere.”
But not for the sort of reason anyone would want. An anonymous Instagram account entitled “House of Effie” was posting screenshots of what appeared to be direct messages sent by Hammer describing sexual fantasies involving rape, bodily mutilation, and, most disquietingly, cannibalism.
The text messages posted by “House of Effie” in January 2021.
In a series of posts, the eponymous “Effie” claimed that she had been in a relationship with Hammer for four years, and that she was one of several women with whom the actor had had an extramarital affair. She also intimated that the activities described in his messages were more than just fantasies. “Women approached me with their affair stories as we talked, overwhelmed with grief, for days and nights without sleeping or eating, with some ending up in the ER,” Effie wrote.
In his decade-plus career, Hammer has played a wide variety of characters, from Leonardo DiCaprio’s love interest, F.B.I. assistant director Clyde Tolson, in the Clint Eastwood–directed J. Edgar, to the Lone Ranger, opposite Johnny Depp. After several attempts at reaching leading-man status met with failure at the box office (The Lone Ranger, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), Hammer seemed to have found a new calling in independent cinema, winning critical acclaim alongside Timothée Chalamet in the 2017 breakout hit Call Me by Your Name. In the months following Effie’s explosive allegations, however, Hammer would be cast in a role for which no amount of rehearsal could prepare him: protagonist in a sordid tale that was equal parts Fifty Shades of Grey and The Silence of the Lambs.
On January 13, Hammer announced that he had dropped out of Shotgun Wedding. “I’m not responding to these bullshit claims but in light of the vicious and spurious online attacks against me, I cannot in good conscience now leave my children for 4 months to shoot a film in the Dominican Republic,” he said in his first and only public statement about the allegations.
If Hammer had hoped that his pulling out of a high-profile project would put an end to the matter, he was wrong. The following day, Courtney Vucekovich, a beauty-app developer who had briefly dated Hammer in the summer of 2020, opened up to the Daily Mail about how he had manipulated her into his “master-slave fetishes.” “He was really into saying he wants to break one of your ribs and eat it. Like barbecue it and eat it,” she told the British tabloid. “In terms of the BDSM [bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism] stuff, he made that pretty clear that it is something he is interested in very early on in the relationship and he referenced breaking my ribs often.” The New York Post checked in with the so-called cannibal cop, the N.Y.P.D. officer busted in 2013 for sharing his cannibalism fetishes on the Internet, so that he could “pass the torch” to Hammer.
Courtney Vucekovich, a beauty-app developer who had briefly dated Hammer in the summer of 2020. She told the Daily Mail that Hammer was “really into saying he wants to break one of your ribs and eat it.”
On January 25, a 22-year-old Instagram influencer named Paige Lorenze, another woman Hammer had dated after separating from his wife, told the New York Post’s Page Six that Hammer had carved the letter A near her vagina with a knife, licked the wound, proposed “consuming her,” and told her that he wanted to eat one of her ribs. “I thought he was kidding,” Lorenze said. “It didn’t register to me this was something he was serious about until he brought it up multiple times and seeing other women come out with the same thing. And then it was like, ‘Wow, this is really scary.’” In a subsequent interview with the Daily Mail, Lorenze said that the incision was “about an inch” deep, engraved with “the whole tip of the blade.”
A lawyer for Hammer denied the allegations. “These assertions about Mr. Hammer are patently untrue,” he said in a statement issued in January 2021 to Us Weekly. “Any interactions with this person, or any partner of his, were completely consensual.” This explanation, however, was to no avail, and Hammer was forced to exit The Offer. The following week, Hammer’s talent agency, W.M.E., dropped him.
By this point, Hammer had become a punch line, his name indelibly linked with the depraved activity that National Geographic terms “the ultimate taboo.” When, at the end of January 2021, a set of human remains was discovered in Wonder Valley, California, a group of Internet sleuths tried to implicate Hammer, citing the fact that he had been working construction on a friend’s hotel project in an area near where the remains were found. The speculation became so feverish that the local police were compelled to release a statement clearing the actor of suspicion.
Paige Lorenze, an Instagram influencer who dated Hammer, with Hammer and Hammer’s mother, Dru Ann Mobley. Lorenze later revealed that Hammer had carved the letter A near her vagina and talked about “consuming her.”
As Hammer took a pummeling in the press, his estranged wife, Chambers, maintained a conspicuous silence, her only comment being a terse “No. Words” written in reply to an Instagram post announcing the production of Bones and All, a cannibalism-themed horror film starring Chalamet, from Luca Guadagnino, the director of Call Me by Your Name.
On February 1, some three weeks after Hammer’s name began trending on Twitter, Chambers issued her first public statement, via Instagram. Accompanying a photograph of a beach in the Cayman Islands, where she was residing with the couple’s two young children, Chambers professed to be “shocked, heartbroken, and devastated” at what the world had discovered about her husband. “Heartbreak aside, I am listening, and will continue to listen and educate myself on these delicate matters. I didn’t realize how much I didn’t know.” Later that month, Page Six reported that Hammer and Chambers had sold their $5 million Los Angeles home after slashing the price by $800,000, and that Hammer had moved out “in the dead of night.”
Efrosina Angelova, the woman behind the Instagram account “House of Effie,” accused Hammer of rape in a pre-recorded statement shown by lawyer Gloria Allred at a press conference on March 18, 2021.
On March 18, 2021, the Los Angeles Police Department opened an investigation into Hammer for sexual assault. And on the same day, the well-known feminist lawyer Gloria Allred hosted a live-streamed press conference in which she announced that she had taken on Effie as a client. In a pre-recorded statement, Effie made a series of disturbing allegations. “On April 24, 2017, Armie Hammer violently raped me for over four hours in Los Angeles, during which he repeatedly slapped my head against a wall, bruising my face,” she said through tears.
“He also committed other acts of violence against me to which I did not consent,” she went on. “For example, he beat my feet with a crop so they would hurt with every step I took for the next week. During those four hours I tried to get away but he wouldn’t let me. I thought that he was going to kill me.” For years, Effie said, she “lived in fear” of Hammer, and while she had “tried so hard to justify his actions” at the time, she had since “come to understand that the immense mental hold he had over me was very damaging on many levels.”
Effie’s charges intensified the case against Hammer. No longer was he a guy with creepy (if legal) sexual fetishes. Now he was a rapist, the perpetrator of unspeakable acts of violence. Soon, Hammer was booted from Billion Dollar Spy, the last film on his slate.
Following Effie’s explosive allegations, Hammer would be cast in a role for which no amount of rehearsal could prepare him: protagonist in a sordid tale that was equal parts Fifty Shades of Grey and The Silence of the Lambs.
Still, the onslaught of accusations continued. At the end of April, an artist named Julia Morrison published a series of private conversations she claimed to have had with Hammer over Instagram in 2020, in which he talked about wanting to make each of his sexual partners into his “own personal little slave” and “having someone prove their love and devotion [by] tying them up in a public place at night and making their body free use.” Morrison minted the conversations as “the first #MeToo NFT,” pledging to donate a portion of the proceeds to women’s charities. “I chose this exchange to signify the relationship between extreme wealth, privilege, predation, and abuse of power,” Morrison wrote in her artist’s statement. “Eat the rich. For real.”
Julia Morrison minted this text exchange with Armie Hammer as “the first #MeToo NFT.”
While Hammer’s devoted fan base tried to parry the accusations against him, there was little they could do to stem the damage to his reputation. The Zeitgeist had formed: Hammer was a violent sexual predator, a rapist with a hankering for human flesh. It didn’t help matters that a vocal portion of the Internet, epitomized by the viral 2017 BuzzFeed article “Ten Long Years of Trying to Make Armie Hammer Happen,” was primed to revel in his downfall. A Vanity Fair piece putting the allegations from his accusers within the context of his troubled familial past—“The Fall of Armie Hammer: A Family Saga of Sex, Money, Drugs, and Betrayal”—was the magazine’s most read article of 2021.
Over the past two years, Effie has used her popular Instagram account as a clearinghouse for attacks on Hammer and anyone who would associate with him. In one April 2021 post, for instance, she boasted of having pressured The Late Late Show into removing all content featuring Hammer from its YouTube channel. Last December, she lashed out at Robert Downey Jr., who reportedly paid for Hammer’s rehab. “@robertdowneyjr I pray that another man does to your daughters what Armie did to me .” Effie posted a similar message to Hammer’s lawyer Blair Berk, who has represented other celebrities accused of sexual misconduct, including Marilyn Manson and Johnny Depp. Asked by a follower about her “biggest fear,” Effie responded, “That A[rmie] or his family will eventually retaliate and kill me.”
As for Hammer, whenever his name surfaces in the press today, it’s as an object of voyeurism, ridicule, or both. Last summer, photographs posted on TMZ of Hammer selling time-shares in the Caymans provided fodder for a fresh round of Schadenfreude: the disgraced actor, a man born to great wealth, reduced to consorting with the plebs. In October, Us Weekly reported that American Express had filed suit against the actor—whose net worth the previous year was estimated at $10 million—for $67,000 in unpaid credit-card debt.
Hammer and his Call Me by Your Name co-star, Timothée Chalamet, at the 2018 Academy Awards.
Other than Dakota Johnson, his co-star in the 2019 movie Wounds, who decried his becoming a victim of “cancel culture” (comments which drew immediate backlash online), none of the many people with whom he’s worked in the industry defended him. And even Johnson has effectively recanted, making Hammer the butt of a joke about cannibalism while presenting the International Icon award to Luca Guadagnino at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. When Disney released a series of individual-character posters to promote Kenneth Branagh’s 2022 Death on the Nile remake, Hammer’s was conspicuously missing.
The saga of Armie Hammer reads like the logline of a #MeToo horror story: rich and famous actor, scion of a family steeped in privilege, physically abuses weak and vulnerable women to satiate his sadomasochistic sexual desires, up to and including torture, branding, and cannibalism. It’s a tale as twisted as the brood from which Hammer descends, a clan notorious for its greed, corruption, and sense of entitlement. It would make a captivating film, though a great deal of dramatic license would be necessary. For the most arresting aspect of the narrative that has formed about Armie Hammer, and the swiftness with which it has shaped events, is how little scrutiny these shocking allegations have received.
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