In every fucked-up family, perhaps somebody finally has to be the one to stand up and say, “Enough.” Usually, that person is a woman and, usually, that family is fucked-up because of a power-hungry patriarch that initiated the trend. For the Trumps, it was Mary to break the cycle of silence, for the Hammers, it’s Casey. Because it was ultimately the rediscovery of her book, Surviving My Birthright, that catalyzed a new online angle about Armie Hammer in the wake of the sensationalist headlines regarding his cannibalistic fetishes. The ones that seemed to mitigate the fact that Armie sexually abused numerous women and got away with it. Just as several generations of Hammer men have gotten away with their own dastardly misdeeds.
That the narrative shifted toward being about all the roles Armie was losing and even, perhaps, what a “great” actor “society at large” was also losing seemed part and parcel of how quickly favor shifts back toward the abuser as opposed to remaining with the abused (this goes for Johnny Depp and Amber Heard as well). It is the latter group that’s frequently accused of lying or, at the very least, “embellishing” for the sake of “publicity.” For Courtney Vucekovich, Paige Lorenze and Julia Morrison, all of whom agreed to be interviewed for the three-part House of Hammer series directed by Elli Hakami and Julian P. Hobbs, there is nothing “fake” about what happened to them. Morrison, in particular, is the one to reiterate how Armie got away with what he did not just through the lack of charges brought against him for rape (specifically, the violation of a woman named Effie), but for the conversation not ever staying focused on his victims. Instead, his behavior—namely the cannibalism—became fodder for late-night talk show and sketch comedy jokes.
Morrison is also adamant about highlighting how cancel culture overshadows the larger issue of rape culture—which is, for the most part, how cancel culture itself has thrived so well in the wake of #MeToo. And yet, seemingly not well enough to keep abusive men from reemerging with every chance they get (see: Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., Woody Allen, Roman Polanski). So it is that the message received over and over again by both abusers and victims alike is that there are no real consequences for “bad behavior” (to use understatement). Especially when that abuser has gobs of cash to cushion himself from any true fallout. And no, Armie is not “broke” as a result of his career being “killed” (for the moment, at least). “Disgraced” as a result of having to sell timeshares in the Cayman Islands, but broke, not so much.
Plus, it’s not as though he doesn’t feel at home in Cayman. Armie’s youth was spent there because apparently his dad saw The Firm and thought, “Why not move to that place?” Something Armie’s anonymously appearing ex-assistant rightly bills as peak “rich people shit.” Doing whatever you want whenever you want simply because you have the whim to do so. Never mind who else it might affect. Therefore, it’s fair to say that what Armie witnessed throughout his life was men doing what they felt like with no fear of or concern for consequences. Which is very dangerous behavior when it comes to relationships with women. Though “relationship” isn’t exactly what Armie wanted out of his sexually transactional exchanges with the females he managed to ensnare through love bombing.
Ironically, Hammer played the husband of beloved feminist icon Ruth Bader-Ginsburg in 2018’s On the Basis of Sex. But that’s telling of Hammer becoming whatever he needed to be in order to weasel his way into people’s, especially women’s, good graces. Which is why Morrison recounts how, when she posted a meme about the rich getting richer off the suffering caused by the pandemic (writing “eat the rich” along with it), Armie slipping into her DMs immediately to agree smacked of blatant hypocrisy. And yet, so often we can’t see what we don’t want to about ourselves. In Armie’s mind, maybe he did really tell himself he was “different” from the rest of his family. That he had, in fact, “pulled himself up by his bootstraps” (when he wasn’t using them to tie or beat women up with) by straying away from the family business and carving out his own “path.” One that certainly didn’t diverge from the sexual miscreant route. Not that there’s, as someone like Vucekovich is sure to note, “anything wrong with that.” So long as the person you’re participating in it with is on the same page. But the entire point for Armie and his male forebears is not consent, but exerting control over women in sexual scenarios against their will to further prove the heights of their power.
Effie, the woman who released a video statement in 2021 detailing her harrowing experience with Armie, is the most prime example of that. And yet, although Effie is a linchpin of the docuseries, her permission was not given to participate in it (which would obviously be very triggering). Thus, her reaction to the project being, “It should always be the survivor’s choice if and when and where to open up about their own trauma. People shouldn’t make documentaries about someone else’s rape and trauma against their consent. It’s not their story to tell. It’s despicable what they’re doing.”
At the same time, Casey Hammer cited her primary motive for participating in House of Hammer as follows, “For me it wasn’t so much about shining a light on his career or his headlines or what’s next for him. It’s more about what’s next for the survivors. I mean, they live with the scars of what was done to them. They’re going to live with that the rest of their lives.” The hope being that with purging oneself of the trauma a little more each day by talking about it, it will start to become a less hurtful wound. Even if it always lives with you. There are ways to alchemize the pain. The kind of pain, essentially, that rich white men have been allowed to inflict for centuries—Hammer or otherwise.
Even so, the docuseries does an effective job of showing how debauchery and a sense of being “above the law” has been baked into the generations of this family for decades upon decades (which is clearly why Armie was so overt about leaving a trail of evidence and believing it wouldn’t come back to haunt him). While House of Hammer focuses its “start” of the bad seed at Armand Hammer (described by one interviewee as “the most satanic man of the second half of the twentieth century”), there is mention of his own father, Julius Hammer. This being the man responsible for founding the communist party in America and yet somehow spawning one of the most capitalist pigs in U.S. history.
A doctor as well as a “leader,” Julius, too, had his “treating women disposably” M.O., in that he ended up killing a girl he gave an abortion to under very dubious circumstances. However, some have speculated Julius actually took the fall for his son, who was then only a medical student. Either way, Julius was likely only jailed for that crime because the woman in question was a Russian diplomat’s wife. But, unfortunately, that “incident” would be nothing compared to Armand’s crimes against humanity as the twentieth century wore on. Complete with the July 6, 1988 explosion of his petroleum company’s offshore Piper Alpha platform, which Armand essentially invoked with his lax safety practices (cutting corners being the best way to ensure free-flowing, unsiphoned-from profit).
As for Armand’s rather useless (unless sex and cocaine parties can be seen as “useful”) son, Julian, it was Bob Dylan who once fittingly sang, “I’m helpless, like a rich man’s child.” That Julian was, especially in terms of understanding pretty much right away that his father viewed him as a piece of shit—because it takes one to know one. Julian seemingly played into that reputation when, perhaps solely as a means to get Daddy’s attention, he killed a “friend” over a disputed debt on the morning of his twenty-sixth birthday in 1955. But with some help from Armand’s cash bribe solution, no charges were brought against Julian, once again setting a precedent within the Hammer family that a powerful man could do whatever he wanted. And that money made problems “disappear.”
While this time around, it might be a Hammer himself who has disappeared instead, it looks unlikely that, even with the release of this documentary, Armie will face much of anything in the way of comeuppance. And, as it’s stated in House of Hammer, if someone in the film industry feels that Armie can generate some money for them, who’s to say he won’t make his inevitable Hollywood comeback? How many times have we seen it happen for men behaving badly, after all? Whether we’re talking about Rob Lowe, Sean Penn, Robert Downey Jr. or Mel Gibson. It’s just a matter of time—something that, in Hollywood ends up forgiving men and punishing most women. And, if nothing else, Armie’s star will likely still shine again when a biopic is made about this entire house of horrors.
