TW: sexual harassment, rape, cannibalism.
Armie Hammer: famous actor, incredibly charismatic guy, and alleged cannibal. Wait a second — did you read that right? Did you just read that Armie Hammer, the guy who played Tonto in The Lone Ranger and Oliver in Call Me By Your Name, the totally debonair and handsome dude who you’d just love to have a coffee with, is a cannibal? Well, yes, unfortunately you did.
Hammer appears to be an exceedingly likeable, humble, and just solid celebrity. In all of his TV interviews, he seems down-to-earth, warm, and funny. His acting is nothing to sneeze at either, absolutely shining in Sorry to Bother You. I would say he’s solidly a B-list actor, though he definitely is (or at least was) on the rise. Until very recently he seemed to have the perfect life: a beautiful wife, two cute kids, mounds and mounds of family money, and a thriving acting career with multiple movies lined up. Yet something very dark was hiding behind his sunny visage that whole time.
About two weeks ago an Instagram user named “House of Effie” posted screenshots of messages she claimed to have received from Hammer. Reportedly, she contacted Hammer because she was a fan, and somehow things took a turn for the worse from there. A turn that led to Hammer writing:
“I need to drink your blood”
“Thinking of holding your heart in my hand…”
“I’ve cut the heart out of a living animal before…”
“I am 100% a cannibal”
And these are only the lines printable in a school paper. There are many much more sexual in nature.
Are these Direct Messages (DMs) real? It’s pretty easy to believe they could be fabricated. Some person fakes these insane messages for some kind of perverse jolt of attention while ruining Golden Boy’s career. So just the DMs alone could be dismissed as fakes pretty easily. And this is what Hammer has done so far, he has called the DMs “vicious and spurious attacks” and refused to even respond to what he is calling “bullsh*t claims.”
But following the DMs, two ex-girlfriends have come forward sharing their own corroborating stories. Paige Lorenze, 22, who dated Hammer for four months last year, reported that Hammer had carved an A (for Armie) into her pelvis with a knife, beat her in bed, and asked her to remove one of her ribs for him to eat on multiple occasions. Courtney Vucekovitch, another ex-girlfriend, described similar abuse. “He said he wanted to break my rib and barbecue and eat it,” she said. Lorenze also described Hammer’s constant manipulation and obsessiveness in their relationship, recalling him texting her 100 times a day when they were apart. Both women talked about how they knew something was wrong, but he was just so charismatic, so powerful, and so manipulative that he made them believe they themselves were at fault for many issues.
This whole controversy is awful, and highlights how our society still tacitly condones and encourages sexual violence. As America has barreled into the 21st century, our sexual culture has become in many ways more debased, only supported by a media increasingly reliant on hypersexual images. Porn has graduated from grainy images of women to literally anything the mind could imagine. Once niche things like BDSM or the sexualization of teens have become much more mainstream. And now we know that Armie Hammer wants to eat people for sexual gratification.
We must change this culture, and believe women when they speak up, especially when accusing celebrities. Powerful men can get away with a lot of harm. Perhaps cannibalism isn’t usually involved, but men like Hammer use their power to satisfy their insane desires all the time. Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and Donald Trump all abused their status to do harm. It’s become clear that Armie Hammer is one incredibly messed up no-good-stay-far-far-away-from-him-at-all-times individual. But there are many more like him, and it is crucial that these people are taken down in order to protect us all.