Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Discovery+
Numerous reports—as well as his own DMs—indicate that Armie Hammer loves to tie women up, physically and sexually abuse and mistreat them, and fantasize about eating their flesh. None of this has been legally proven and he currently faces no criminal charges for any of the claims leveled against him, but the court of public opinion has spoken thanks to the accusations of multiple former girlfriends about his habitual pattern of coercion and control. House of Hammer will only further damage his tattered reputation, revisiting those ugly allegations through the testimony of outspoken ex-paramour Courtney Vucekovich and the social media sleuths who amplified her story and others like it.
Worse for the actor, though, are the contentions made by his aunt, Casey Hammer, about their illustrious family, which she says is defined by its history of male domination, criminality and sexual monstrousness.
A three-part Discovery+ docuseries premiering on September 2, House of Hammer’s main hook is the participation of Casey, who levels an enormous amount of censure at her grandfather Armand, his son (and her father) Julian, and her brother (and Armie’s father) Michael. As she tells it, these individuals were three of a dysfunctional, callous, bullying kind, and she’s more than happy—along with directors Elli Hakami and Julian P. Hobbs—to air the clan’s dirty laundry, beginning with Armand, whose dad was the founding member of the American Communist Party, and who himself supposedly spent his early years working as a veritable spy against the United States, channeling money and intel from our shores to the Soviet Union. When it came time to become a capitalist power player, Armand erased those elements from his backstory, as well as dispatched his first two wives before marrying his third, who was the financier for his eventual rise to mogul status at the head of Occidental Petroleum.