House of Hammer, a working title for an upcoming project from ID and Discovery+, will cover various scandals involving actor Armie Hammer and his family. The Lone Ranger star’s movie career ended after several women accused him of rape and as someone who engaged in varying degrees of sexual abuse and attempted cannibalism. According to Variety, the special will use a trove of archives and interviews from survivors and unspecified family members to investigate “a dysfunctional dynasty with its male characters exhibiting all the devastating consequences of privilege gone wild.”
Armie Hammer was born into a family of considerable wealth with a history that dates back to the 1700s. His paternal great-grandfather, Armand Hammer, was an oil tycoon whose parents were Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire and were of Ukrainian Jewish descent. Armie’s father inherited the family’s vast fortune with an estimated value of more than $180 million. Money would not be the only thing passed down through generations, particularly to the men.
Hammer Family Tied to Everything from Sexual Assaults to Murder
In March 2021, a woman known by the alias “Effie” accused the actor of violently raping and beating her for hours in 2017. During a press conference with her attorney Gloria Allred, “Effie” stated that she thought he was going to kill her. Hammer denied the allegations, but soon a slew of unverified Instagram DMs was released, alleging the actor’s detailed lurid sexual fantasies, including acts of cannibalism. The spectacle prompted an anonymous source to release a statement addressing the controversy.
“He has never eaten human flesh, he has never drank blood, he has never cut off a toe, he has never locked anybody in a cage, or whatever else is in these crazy messages. These messages definitely shouldn’t be taken literally – even if he did text them.”
Shortly afterward, Hammer’s career suffered as he found himself dropped from one project after another. The Hammer family’s scandals did not start with him. Armie’s great-great-grandfather, Dr. Julius Hammer, was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and imprisoned in 1919 after performing an abortion on a Russian diplomat’s wife, who eventually died days later after the procedure. Armie’s great-grandfather, Armand, who made his fortune by investing money he received from his third wife, was known for being involved in wide-ranging grifts, which included money laundering, bribing his way into the oil business, and using artwork to fund Soviet espionage. Armie’s grandfather, Julian Hammer, killed a man in 1955 reportedly over a gambling debt. He was arrested, but the charges were later dismissed. Allegedly, he had $50,000 in cash delivered to an attorney in Los Angeles right before the charges were dropped. Julian Hammer was also accused of sexually abusing his daughter Casey when she was a child.