Armie Hammer and the beach ball of doom

EDIT: I subscribed to Air Mail last week and today they sent me a mail shot of their “5 must read pieces”. So I wrongly assumed the Armie Hammer piece was from today. My bad.

So please take this article as the analysis I should have done at the time, but I missed this article when it came out. Ugh.

An article appeared in US publication Air Mail in 2023. In Armie Hammer Breaks His Silence, journalist James Kirchick describes what Hammer was accused of back in 2021 when the entertainment world turned its back on him.

Then Kirchick carefully lays out the case that it was - without ever saying the words - a witch hunt by crazy bitches who kink shamed him and ruined his life.

Kirchick doesn’t say why they randomly decided to go after Hammer, but it’s there between every breathless line.

It’s the kind of piece that instantly makes me far more interested in the author rather than its subject.

Let’s have a look at some specific passages to see if we can work out what’s really going on here.

After a detailed rundown of all the projects Hammer had lined up in 2021 - the year it all went wrong - Kirchick describes the allegations made by multiple women in detail. The word “claims” comes up a lot, even regarding Hammer’s ex-wife who we’ll come to later.

“The saga of Armie Hammer reads like the logline of a #MeToo horror story: rich and famous actor, scion of a family steeped in privilege, physically abuses weak and vulnerable women to satiate his sadomasochistic sexual desires, up to and including torture, branding, and cannibalism.”

It reads that way because that is actually how multiple women described Hammer’s behaviour towards them. Kirchick missed out the bit about abusing his status as a celebrity to manipulate women into letting him hurt them. But OK. He’s indicating that it ‘reads’ like this, but should we really believe what we read?

By the end of Kirchick’s piece, I’m questioning the very nature of reality too.

“…the most arresting aspect of the narrative… is how little scrutiny these shocking allegations have received.”

Kirchick states, even as a journalist who must be well aware of the legal hoops any story like this will have had to jump through to get published, that now is a good time to characterise the women’s accounts as lacking scrutiny.

I’ve worked on #MeToo investigative stories. Most of them die on the vine because the legal threshhold you need to meet is incredibly high. Hammer comes from immense wealth. Should he wish to sue any of these women or the publications that printed their words for defamation, I don’t think he’d find it difficult to do so. He chooses not to. He says it’s because he just wants to “move on”.

And so to the focus of Kirchick’s piece. Effie, the first woman to go public with her accusations.

“Hammer says, he told Effie that he would have to desist communicating with her because “having casual conversations with a girl online would make my life really difficult.”

Hammer says they were talking online about a charity thing, it was all very uneventful, then he sent her the above message because this married film star was actually being conscientious. They were, he says, just talking about a charity she wanted him to help with but he tried to stop their conversation anyway.

Then, he says, she came straight back with the information she used to work in a sex dungeon. Just out of the blue. I’m sure he was shocked, being such a conscientious married film star and all. What on earth had made her think he’d be interested to know this? Wild.

He then goes into a long analogy about a beach ball which, for me, called to mind former Prince Andrew and his inability to sweat in a Pizza Express.

Hammer’s essence is, he says, a beach ball which he was figuratively holding under water because of social convention. This single remark from Effie, totally unsolicited, saw his beach ball SHOOT into the air.

“When Effie told him that she used to work in a sex club, Hammer says, “my beach ball slipped, and it just shot way up into the air. It probably wasn’t a week later that I had been messaging [her] a lot, like throughout the day, and it got extremely explicit.”

His beach ball slipped. They had an affair. As more women started to join Effie in accusing the actor of coercing sexual deviance out of them, Effie went further and accused him of rape.

He counters now that the four-hour, violent ordeal she described was in fact a kink scene, role play in which she’d agreed to everything beforehand. Law enforcement have since dropped their investigation. Another case of he said, she said that doesn’t meet the threshhold for a prosecution.

Then it just gets wilder.