Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty/Screenshot/YouTube
In January 2021, after nearly a year living under relative COVID isolation, an anonymous Instagram account with the name @HouseOfEffie began posting screenshots of DMs the actor Armie Hammer had sent to a number of women detailing rape and cannibalism fantasies.
The viral messages prompted a number of his recent exes to come forward, including Courtney Vucekovich, an entrepreneur who’d accused him of emotional abuse, and Paige Lorenze, a college student who alleged that he branded her and spoke of removing and eating one of her ribs. Eventually, the owner of the Instagram account, Effie, materialized at a press conference where she emotionally described being raped by Hammer for four hours, prompting an LAPD investigation. She was only 20 at the time. (Hammer has denied the allegations.)
That such disturbing claims had surfaced about Hammer, a seemingly clean-cut, attractive, uninteresting Hollywood star from an aristocratic family—he is named after his great-grandfather, the late oil tycoon Armand Hammer—took many by surprise. But not his Aunt Casey.