Early in 2021 Dru Hammer’s world fell apart. The previous year her son, the actor Armie Hammer (star of Call Me by Your Name and The Social Network), and his wife Elizabeth Chambers announced their separation after ten years of marriage. The split seemed amicable. Throughout lockdown they had been quarantining with their two children, Harper Grace, then five, and Ford Douglas Armand, three, at the family house in the Cayman Islands with Armie’s father Michael and stepmother Misty, and perhaps the pressure had been too much.
Then, in January 2021, women started coming forward with allegations against her son of illicit affairs, rape and cannibalistic fantasies. In March an accuser, Effie, said he’d committed rape ‘and other acts of violence’ during a four-year affair. She also published private messages purportedly written by Hammer, in which he allegedly said, among other things, ‘I need to drink your blood,’ and ‘I am a 100% cannibal’. The comments circulated widely on social media. Texas business owner Courtney Vucekovich, who dated Armie after his divorce, claimed, ‘He said to me he wants to break my rib and barbecue and eat it.’ Paige Lorenze, who dated him for four months in 2020, said that he had branded his initial ‘A’ into her pubic area with a knife, bruised and sexually coerced her.
Before the fall: Dru and son Armie, New York, 2015
The claims forced Armie to renounce his role in the movie Shotgun Wedding, co-starring Jennifer Lopez, and a Godfather spin-off called The Offer, before filming was to begin in July 2021. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) began investigating the sexual assault allegations. Women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred announced she was representing Effie, who has since identified herself as Efrosina Angelova. Soon after, Armie’s agency WME dropped him and his final projects in the pipeline – Gaslit, The Billion Dollar Spy and The Minutes, a Broadway show, bit the dust.
Armie Hammer was cancelled.
‘These young girls thought he was Mr Right, whereas he looked at them as Mrs Right Now’
‘I call it the perfect storm,’ says Dru carefully when we speak over Zoom. ‘All of this unfolded during Covid when people were locked away in their homes and the feeding frenzy for new information was at an all-time high. Every day, more and more articles were published. Obviously, I am his mother. I would never say that Armie did everything right, because he didn’t. Morally, he was wrong. But I do know my son was not out eating people. That I know. And Armie did not rape anybody. I knew that he was not morally right, but that was insanity.’
From the outset, Armie assured her he was innocent. ‘He said, ‘Mom, this whole rape accusation is nonsense,’ recalls Dru. ‘There were a couple of times where I was like, ‘Well, if you won’t talk [to the press], can I talk?’ Because these girls had been in my home. And he was like, ‘No, we’re going to be silent, Mom. The truth always comes out.’ I think, despite everything, he really handled it better than I would have.’
Dru is talking to me from Paradise Valley, Arizona, where she’s staying with Sara O’Meara and Yvonne Fedderson, the founders of ChildHelp.org, a nonprofit on whose board she sits, which runs a national child helpline in the US. On my screen she looks younger than her 62 years, wearing a pink camouflage turtleneck top and a denim jacket. Although much of our conversation is painful, she has a wry sense of humour, too. She’s telling her story – and her account of a much larger set of scandals that surround the wider Hammer family – in her new autobiography, Hammered. It’s a story that dates back many decades and involves everything from murder to political intrigue. For Dru, it began when she married Michael Hammer in 1985 at the age of 23.
A young Armie, Dallas, 1990
He was the eldest grandson of the billionaire oil tycoon Armand Hammer, known as ‘Lenin’s chosen capitalist’. Armand left Michael the vast majority of his $40 million fortune, but with the inheritance came a history of family cruelty, infidelity and abuse that still impacts Dru today.
The book is being published after the LAPD announced in May last year that it would not pursue charges of sexual assault due to the ‘inability to prove a non-consensual, forcible sexual encounter’. Meanwhile, a photo of a bite mark Vucekovich claimed was Armie’s turned out to have been taken from Pinterest.
But the damage to Armie’s career was already done. In 2021, he checked into rehab for nearly six months, with his mentor Robert Downey Jr paying the bill. A year later, Armie was reported to be selling timeshare accommodation in the Caymans to make ends meet, the Hammer family fortune having apparently been squandered by Michael.
It’s a steep fall. The actor had nudged his way into Hollywood playing Christian evangelist Billy Graham in the DVD-only film Billy: The Early Years. Cast subsequently by Mad Max director George Miller as Batman in Justice League: Mortal – a film that was aborted in 2008 – he finally got his break in the much-praised The Social Network. With directors from Clint Eastwood to Guy Ritchie and Kenneth Branagh picking him for supporting roles, in 2018 there was talk of an Oscar nomination for his performance in Call Me By Your Name.
From left, Julian, Armand, Armie and Michael, Los Angeles, 1990
He has begun to give interviews since the allegations – one to the newsletter AirMail last year and another to the Painful Lessons podcast last month. In the first, he accepted he was emotionally abusive in relationships and admitted to a penchant for bondage and sado-masochism, which he attributed to being abused by a pastor at 13. In the second he denied the allegations about cannibalism. He said he ‘didn’t feel good’ about his life before it crashed and burned. ‘I never was in a place where I was happy with myself, where I had self-esteem,’ he said.
Last week on the Piers Morgan Uncensored show on YouTube, the actor said ‘no’ when asked if had ever eaten human flesh, but admitted to ‘awkward and clumsy’ rape role play with Effie Angelova and to having scraped the letter ‘A’ into Paige Lorenze’s pubic bone with a knife, adding, ‘I mean, there wasn’t even blood in the situation’. He told Morgan he was now broke and spoke in detail about the collapse of his marriage due to his infidelity.
‘He called me when he landed in London and said he was on the way to Piers Morgan,’ says Dru. ‘He didn’t seem nervous – he said my story is my story, he’s not going to throw anyone under the bus. There are a lot of things he could have said that he has always refused to say and he has always been very cognisant of being very kind to the mother of his children. I’m really proud of him for giving his truth and not telling tales on anyone else. Let me tell you, I showed him my book where I said he was morally wrong and that the way he behaved is not the correct way to treat women and he did not ask for an edit. I love his frankness and honesty.’
His mother has no illusions about her son’s behaviour but always believed he was innocent of any actual crimes. ‘He was in the wrong,’ she says. ‘He was the older actor and they were younger. They were influencers on Instagram or whatever. Did he take advantage of them? Absolutely. He will say so himself. Did he do anything criminal? Absolutely not. He’s been completely exonerated by the police.’
Armie with Timothée Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name, 2017
In autumn 2022, Gloria Allred dropped Effie as a client after she refused to sign an affidavit – a sworn statement admissible in court – which detailed her allegations. Text messages shared with the newsletter AirMail appear to show Effie pursuing Hammer and telling others, ‘He is not dangerous. He didn’t rape anyone.’
Dru recalls that one of Armie’s accusers stayed with him in her home over Thanksgiving. ‘She was a puppy dog around Armie, madly in love with him,’ says Dru. ‘She seemed very sweet. I think these young girls thought that he was Mr Right, whereas he looked at them as Mrs Right Now. When he was done with the girls, he cavalierly moved on. I watched my husband do the same to me after [27] years, so I know how it feels.
‘Armie was not in a healthy spot. He was medicating, was not able to see his children. As a mother you hurt as much watching your son spiral, leaving a trail of young broken hearts and a young wife suffering. Elizabeth suffered the worst of us all with two young children, trying to survive the betrayal.’
Dru called her after the divorce had gone through in 2023 and said how sorry she was. ‘I know the devastation of infidelity and divorce,’ she told her. ‘I just pray that if I have hurt you in any way, I’m asking you to forgive me. All I care about is you brought my grandchildren into this world and I will always love you for that. I want a relationship with my grandchildren.’ Elizabeth has spoken of Armie being ‘sober, healthy and happy. He’s really present when he’s with the kids, and that’s all I can hope for.’
Dru tells me that she found the years of waiting for the LAPD verdict hard for many reasons. During that time, Armie’s father, her ex-husband Michael, died of cancer and although their split had been painful, they had become friends in later years, and she’d visited him in hospital a few times before he passed. Then in 2022, a documentary, House of Hammer, was released on Discovery+, charting the bizarre tale of the Hammer dynasty, unpicking the controversies and scandal surrounding the family.
It revealed that in 1919, for instance, Armie’s great-great-grandfather Dr Julius Hammer, a Russian Jewish communist living in the Bronx, performed an illegal abortion on the wife of a Russian diplomat. She died as a result, and he was sent to Sing Sing prison in New York state for manslaughter. His son Armand Hammer, Armie’s great-grandfather and namesake, became a successful businessman, exporting agricultural paraphernalia and fertiliser to Russia, selling alcoholic ginger beer during Prohibition and taking over Occidental Petroleum, using deals in Libya to break the US hold on fixing oil prices. Armand was a serial philanderer who bugged his mistresses’ cars, helped fund Nixon’s attempts to cover up Watergate and, when his son Julian killed a man over gambling debts, paid out large sums of cash to get the charges dismissed.
With Elizabeth and their children, California, 2017
‘When I met Dr Armand Hammer, I didn’t even know enough to be intimidated by him,’ says Dru with a small laugh. ‘We didn’t have Google back then. I walked into his home and there’s Modiglianis [on the walls]. But what I did know is that they had everything, and they had nothing. I saw the dysfunction in Armand’s only child, Julian, when we first met. I remember going to his house and there were rooms of pornography and pills, and he was an alcoholic. I didn’t even know people like that existed, and certainly not in a family I’m marrying into.’
Dru grew up in a Christian household. She was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma where her father was a land developer and owned some local businesses, as well as being a pastor in a local church. Dru and her sisters, Lisa and Mel, had a ‘Norman Rockwell’-style childhood with ‘Christ in the centre’. The family were so devoted to forgiveness and repentance that, when her father discovered one of his business partners – a good friend – had been cheating him by fiddling the books, he took the man to lunch and asked him to forgive him for his anger.
The Hammer family, on the other hand, took dysfunction to a new level. Armand insisted his only son Julian and his grandchildren book appointments to see him. He left more or less everything to grandson Michael in his will, following his death in 1990 at the age of 92. Julian struggled with substance abuse and abused his own kids Michael, Casey and their half-sister Jan Ward, according to Casey, who told all in the House of Hammer documentary. While marriage to Michael meant Dru got to travel the world, meeting the likes of Princess Diana and Mikhail Gorbachev thanks to Armand’s connections, she admits that if she’d had any sense of the family trauma, she would have done things very differently.
‘Oh my gosh, I would cut off my left arm if I knew 40 years ago what I know now,’ she says. ‘Michael was abused as a child by his father. I didn’t understand his deep-stemmed problems – trauma, feeling abandoned. He never spoke about it, so I thought everything was great. We should have been in Christian counselling where those things are brought out. I believe there were so many infidelities in our marriage because he was using those affairs to build up his self-esteem.’
From left: Dru, Viktor, Michael, Armand, Armie, Casey and Julian, 1989
When the two married in 1985, Michael converted to Christianity, and their children Armie and his younger brother Viktor were educated in Christian schools. The family spent a few years in the Cayman Islands, then moved to LA where the boys went to the private Los Angeles Baptist High School in the San Fernando Valley. Dru says Armie’s life got a lot tougher there – he was bullied and, aged 13, sought haven in a Christian youth group where the pastor took him under his wing and befriended the family.
‘We did not know he was grooming us,’ Dru says. ‘When we finally found out, Armie said, ‘It’s no big deal. Nothing happened.’ My biggest regret is not being more proactive. A few years ago we learned things did happen with the youth pastor. When children are molested they are embarrassed and blame themselves, thinking they must have done something and that’s why that happened. Armie should have been in years of counselling. I was thinking, ‘He was so strong. He stopped it.’ I’m so Pollyanna. As a child, when you’re molested like that by a pastor, you tend to blame God, so you turn to other things, just like his father did.’
She believes that Armie has repented now, and repentance is crucial for Dru. Seven years into their marriage, Michael cheated on her but repented; at the time, she believed him to be sincere. Twenty years later, she discovered he was being unfaithful again. She fled to Aspen, only returning to LA when he begged her to come back for her birthday. They went out for dinner, he gave her a Hermès bag and beseeched her to come home. When she asked why he’d cheated, however, it was his casual reply – ‘it was fun’ – that ended the marriage for her.
‘There was repentance seven years in,’ she explains. ‘But that time, none. With Armie, I’ve watched him very closely. He got completely sober, which is a miracle. He went to rehab because he knew his drinking and infidelities were masking the pain of being molested. He had to lose everything that’s important in order to come back to God.’ She pauses and beams. ‘And Armie’s about to start working again. He wrote a script and has a few people interested. He’s been offered another movie that he’s excited about.’ She smiles carefully. ‘I’m not allowed to talk about it yet.’
How much responsibility does she take for her son’s damaged upbringing? She tells me that, after she left Michael in 2012, his life was a whirl of women and illicit substances – wild ways that appealed to his two sons. ‘I was not a bowl of cherries to be around after the divorce,’ Dru admits. ‘I was so devastated that they didn’t want to come and see me but they’d go partying with their dad.’ She regrets that her sons saw their father ‘morally implode’, but today she’s proud of them both. Viktor, 36, is a securities broker at Morgan Stanley, based in South Carolina. Armie, now 37, she hopes might be on his way back into Hollywood, although he spends time in the Caymans where Elizabeth and his kids are. Dru lives in Palm Beach, Florida, so doesn’t see them as much as she’d like but she talks to Armie a lot, and says he is the healthiest she’s known him.
‘A big theme of the book is forgiveness,’ she concludes. ‘If we don’t forgive, it doesn’t hurt the other person. Michael was having a ball whether I forgave him or not. The only thing anger would have done is make me bitter. But it’s a process. That’s the main thing I hope I get across – it takes time, but it’s worth it.’
Hammered will be available on Amazon from Tuesday, £13.90. Profits from the book go to the Hammered Heart Foundation, which donates to organisations including childhelp.org and addiction charity dreamcenter.org. See druville.com for details
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Publish date : 2024-07-26 23:59:00
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