Armie Hammer’s accusers blast his ‘manipulative’ suicide story

With Armie Hammer’s recent claim that he was driven to consider suicide in February 2021, after he was mired in a cannibalism scandal and allegations of sex abuse, two of his three accusers have come forward to question the details of his story about his personal crisis, explaining that the actor’s messages to them show him telling a similar narrative a year earlier.

In his first interview since the career-threatening scandal, Hammer, 36, told Air Mail that in February 2021 he “just walked out into the ocean and swam out as far as I could and hoped that either I drowned, or was hit by a boat, or eaten by a shark,” the Daily Beast reported. The disgraced “Call Me By Your Name” star said he turned back to shore because “I realized that my kids were still on shore, and that I couldn’t do that to my kids.”

Hammer also told Air Mail that all of his sexual encounters have been consensual and that “every single thing was discussed beforehand.”

During part of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hammer quarantined in the Cayman Islands with his wife, Elizabeth Chambers, and their two small children. Hammer’s father and stepmother also were there, the Daily Beast said. In early 2021, rumors and allegations about Hammer began to circulate, based on screenshots of messages that he purportedly wrote to different women. Among other things, he said, I am 100% a cannibal.” Three women — Efrosina “Effie” Angelova, Courtney Vucekovich and Paige Lorenze — soon came forward to accuse him of sexual abuse.

Following Hammer’s Air Mail interview, Angelova, 26, wrote on Instagram Monday that Hammer had previously shared that story with her before she went public with her accusations in early 2021, the Daily Beast said. Angelova has alleged that the “Call Me By Your Name” star “violently raped her.

“It seems so manipulative because he knows his ocean story shut me up last time and evoked sympathy and it’s like now he’s trying it again,” she wrote. “I think on some level he feels guilty.”

Another accuser, Vucekovich, told Page Six that Hammer said something similar about attempting suicide by swimming out into the ocean in DMs he sent to her in June 2020. According to the Instagram DMs viewed by Page Six, Hammer wrote about tensions within his family during the isolation of lockdown. He had also told British GQ in the fall of 2020 that the situation with his family was “very complicated, intense, with  big personalities all locked in a little tiny place. … I think, to be quite frank, I came very close to completely losing my mind.”

In an Instagram DM to Vucekovich, Hammer wrote: “So, my dad and I are almost getting in to [sic] fist fights every night and my wife and I are fighting all day,” he wrote at the time, Page Six reported. “Then Covid hits … and they go full draconian shut down. No one allowed outside. At all. … So it becomes a pressure cooker. And I started to lose my mind.”

“Long story short….I swam out really far in the ocean. Too far,” Hammer told Vucekovich, according to Page Six.  “And immediately realized how bad things had gotten, got a therapist…got a plan to get out, but my plan was asinine.”

Page Six said a representative for Hammer did not respond to requests for comment about why he either changed the timeline of the story he told AirMail, or why he told versions of the story several times. A source close to the Golden Globe nominee agreed with Angelova that he told the story to Air Mail for “sympathy.”

The Air Mail interview likely marked Hammer’s attempt to repair his reputation, if not his career, even as the Los Angeles Police Department said it continues to investigate the sexual assault allegations against him.

The summer before the scandal broke, Hammer’s wife had filed for divorce. Chambers said in a new interview with Elle that she had no idea what he allegedly had been doing with other women. She learned of the allegations at the same time the public did. “I was like, ‘There are no words. What the (expletive)?’”

With Elle, Chambers did not share any intimate details about her relationship with Hammer, though she has acknowledged they faced other trials in their marriage, including infidelity. She described his behavior as problematic during the family’s quarantine in 2020.

“He was the worst,” Chambers told Elle.

Chambers said the marriage was over once Hammer decided to leave the Caymans during the early months of the pandemic and go stay with a friend in California.

“My heart was broken in nine million pieces, and I still drove him to the airport,” Chambers told Elle. She said the two remain in contact as they work out how to co-parent their children. She also continues to support him.

“All I’ve ever wanted is for him to be sober, healthy, and happy,” Chambers said. “And he is that. He’s really present when he’s with the kids, and that’s all I can hope for. All you want is for your children to have two solid parents, right? That’s always the goal, so anything I can do to support that, I will.”