"A real life #Cannibal"... Really?
"A real life #Cannibal"... Really?
How we stumbled upon the Armie Hammer story and began investigating one of the most bizarre and surreal cases of our time.
In the beginning of 2021, as 2020 faded into memory and the new year commenced, a hashtag began trending on Twitter that immediately caught our attention.
“A real life #Cannibal,” it read, and it was in relation to none other than clean-cut Hollywood actor Armie Hammer, he of “Call Me By Your Name” fame.
We were at the time and had been for months investigating the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard case, researching and writing about the way Heard’s alleged charitable “donations” never materialized, which we confirmed using the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles’ own donor records, and questioning why others in media refused to investigate what were glaring inconsistencies in Heard’s story. These are the sort of details that would and should intrigue any journalist into action, because “seek[ing] truth and report[ing] it” is —or should be— our ultimate motivation. Apparently, for many, these ethics did not apply when the #MeToo hashtag entered the calculation; we do today and have always disagreed with this assessment.
As seasoned as we were by the outrageousness of the Depp/Heard case itself, with Heard shouting through our screens that she did, in fact, hit Depp, all the while gaslighting him about it as if what she had done didn’t matter (a recording already available since the beginning of 2020 that would later feature prominently in the Depp v. Heard trial in Virginia in 2022), we were still absolutely floored by the intriguing, dark nature of the claims that Armie Hammer was “a real life #Cannibal,” and we knew immediately we would need to investigate the allegations.
In January, 2021, with the Depp/Heard case in a lull before the Virginia trial was set to start, we dove into the Hammer story head-on.
The story that began with claims that Armie Hammer is a “#Cannibal” is one of the most wild and intriguing stories we have ever researched, a story that epitomizes the way unverified allegations sprinkled into the sensationalizing internet/Twittersphere can balloon into life-altering narratives. It is a story that shows the way movements, even the most well-meaning ones, can be co-opted and abused by people with misguided and even nefarious, self-serving intentions. It is a story about the way some people can delude themselves into creating their own realities, even if those realities don’t align with the physical world around them.
More than anything, it is a story about sex and love and mistaking sex for love, especially sex that falls outside the parameters of normalized human interaction and transgresses into alternative expressions of desire. It is a #MeToo story only in that the accuser really wanted it to be and framed it as such publicly, but it is NOT a #MeToo story in that the evidence and corroborating details point to NO crime (to the extent that no charges were ever filed) beyond Hammer’s failure to fulfill the youthful fantasies of a troubled woman for whom the potential promise of partaking in Hammer’s glamorous celebrity life came to mean too much.
This is the story we will share here. Please subscribe to follow along!