The actor has been under investigation since 2021.
Allegations of sexual assault against the actor Armie Hammer are being reviewed by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, CNN has learned.
“I can confirm that the LAPD has presented a case regarding Armie Hammer to the LADA. The matter is currently under review,” the office’s communications director told the network.
Hammer, who is best known for his role in 2018’s Call Me By Your Name, was once one of Hollywood’s most prominent rising stars. The news of this review is the latest in a slew of ongoing disgraces that have spelled the actor’s downfall.
A slew of accusations
Per CNN, the DA’s spokesperson didn’t offer any specifics about the complainant or case in question, but Hammer has been under investigation since 2021, when a 24-year-old known only as “Effie” accused Hammer of raping her, among other abuses.
Effie, who was in a relationship with Hammer between 2016 and 2020, said that she met him on Facebook and fell “instantly” in love. She claimed that he pushed her boundaries as their relationship progressed, testing the limits of her attachment to him.
He allegedly became “increasingly more violent,” Effie told the press in 2021. Effie said that Hammer raped her violently for more than four hours on April 24, 2017, in Los Angeles.
“He abused me mentally, emotionally and sexually,” she asserted. Apparently, Hammer dismissed his behavior at the time as a “twisted form of love.”
Hammer’s attorney rebuffed Effie’s claims as “outrageous,” and stated that all Hammer’s interactions with her and other partners “have been completely consensual, discussed and agreed upon in advance, and mutually participatory.”
Hammer himself contended that Effie was still sending him sexual messages in 2020, claiming this undermined her story.
The swirl of controversy around Hammer has intensified over the last few years, ever since an anonymous Instagram account began posting what appeared to be “sexts” from the actor directed at women. The messages described graphic rape and cannibalism fantasies. In one, Hammer allegedly asked someone if he could “cut off one of your toes and keep it with me in my pocket so I always had a piece of you in my possession.”
In the wake of these messages going public, women who’d dated Hammer began to come forward and described far more concerning behavior that went far beyond extreme kinks, constituting intense psychological abuse.
“He said to me he wants to break my rib and barbecue and eat it,” app founder Courtney Vucekovich told Page Six in 2021.
Vucekovich, who dated Hammer for a few months in 2020, said that he gave a “captivating” first impression, but used his charisma to overwhelm her, eventually devolving into seriously obsessive and controlling patterns.
“He quickly grooms you in the relationship,” she explained. “He kind of captivates you and while being charming, he’s grooming you for these things that are darker and heavier and consuming. When I say consuming, I mean mentally, physically, emotionally, financially, just everything.”
Hammer opens up about “extreme” lifestyle
In an interview in February, Hammer described his past in more digestible terms.
“I had a very intense and extreme lifestyle,” Hammer told the digital newsletter Air Mail. “I would scoop up these women, bring them into it – into this whirlwind of travel and sex and drugs and big emotions flying around – and then as soon as I was done, I’d just drop them off and move on to the next woman, leaving that woman feeling abandoned or used.”
Hammer attributes his behavior towards women to being sexually assaulted by a pastor when he was 13 years old.
“What that did for me was it introduced sexuality into my life in a way that it was completely out of my control,” he told Air Mail. “I was powerless in the situation. I had no agency in the situation. My interests then went to: I want to have control in the situation, sexually.”
While he strenuously denied any criminality in his past romantic relationships, Hammer admitted that the “power dynamics” had been skewed.
“I would have these younger women in their mid-20s, and I’m in my 30s,” he said. “I was a successful actor at the time. They could have been happy to just be with me and would have said yes to things that maybe they wouldn’t have said yes to on their own.”
He said that while he’d been “an asshole,” he’s since become a “healthier, happier, more balanced person.”
