Armie Hammer addressed his 2021 sex scandal that resulted in accusations against the actor ranging from rape to cannibal sex fantasies on family friend Tyler Ramsey’s podcast “Painful Lessons.” The actor responded with incredulity about the public response to the latter charge, telling Ramsey, “People called me a cannibal. Like I ate people. What?! You know what you have to do to be a cannibal? You have to eat people! How am I going to be a cannibal?! Like, it was bizarre.”
Hammer also said that he’s in a 12-step program following an “ego death” he went through after the accusations surfaced. “I was drunk. I was high and I was acting like an idiot all the time,” he explained. “It was an ego death, a career death. A neutron bomb went off in my life. It killed off [everything].”
Rehab has changed him, he continued. After he repeated a 2023 revelation that he experienced sexual abuse as a child, Hammer added that he attempted suicide (kind of). “I was getting hate, before I knew how to love myself, so it just went right in. So there were points where I was just like, I can’t take this anymore. And I hit really dark, low points. There was a time where I was standing on the shore, and I just looked out at the ocean and thought, yep, this is it.”
“I swam out really f–king far,” Hammer continued. “And I thought, ‘You know what, like, I’m done. Like, there’s nothing back there for me.’ And I got out really far, and then was just laying there. And I mean, it’s kind of like a half-assed suicide attempt, but I was there, and I was in it. And it seemed like the only option for me.”
“And then an image of my kids popped into my head, standing on the shore saying, ‘Where’s Dad?’ And I was like, I can’t do that to my kids. So I swum back,” Hammer explained.
In terms of what behavior the actor appeared to believes constituted “acting like an idiot,” in March 2021, a woman who went by the name Effie accused Hammer of violently raping her for over four hours. She further said the actor banged her head into a wall repeatedly and beat her feet with a crop.
“During those four hours, I tried to get away but he wouldn’t let me. I thought that he was going to kill me. He then left with no concern for my well-being,” Effie said at the time. “I was completely in shock and couldn’t believe someone I loved did that to me. I tried so hard to justify his actions, even to the point of responding to him in a way that did not reflect my true feelings.”
Hammer was married to ex-wife Elizabeth Chambers at the time.
In a February 2023 interview with Air Mail, Hammer said, “I had a very intense and extreme lifestyle. 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.”
He also claimed to be guilty of “emotional abuse.” As he put it, “I’m here to own my mistakes, take accountability for the fact that I was an asshole, that I was selfish, that I used people to make me feel better, and when I was done, moved on. And treated people more poorly than they should have been treated.”
In May 2023, the Los Angeles DA’s office declined to charge Hammer with sexual assault. Bureau of Communications director Tiffany Blackwell explained, “Sexual assault cases are often difficult to prove, which is why we assign our most experienced prosecutors to review them. In this case, those prosecutors conducted an extremely thorough review, but determined that at this time, there is insufficient evidence to charge Mr. Hammer with a crime.”
“As prosecutors, we have an ethical responsibility to only charge cases that we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt. We know that it is hard for women to report sexual assault. Even when we cannot move forward with a prosecution, our victim service representatives will be available to those who seek our victim support services. Due to the complexity of the relationship and inability to prove a nonconsensual, forcible sexual encounter, we are unable to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt,” Blackwell added.
Watch the new interview with Armie Hammer from “Painful Lessons” in the video above.
