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Armie Hammer has responded to accusations that he carved his initials into his ex-girlfriend’s body.
In 2021, the 37-year-old Call Me By Your Name star found himself at the center of a social media firestorm after direct messages allegedly sent from Hammer detailed graphic sexual desires and cannibalistic fetishism.
He was subsequently accused of rape and abuse. Hammer has consistently denied any criminal wrongdoing and said that all of his relationships with women were consensual.
Hammer’s ex-girlfriend Paige Lorenze later came forward with alleged details from their “extreme” relationship, including that the actor had engaged in knife play and carved an “A” into her pubic area.
Appearing on the latest episode of Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast, Hammer addressed Lorenze’s accusations that he “branded” her explaining that it was “part of [a] whole bigger picture.”
“It’s like you get into these things, you get in these moods, you get in these whatever,” The Social Network actor said. “Especially if you’re inebriated or especially if whatever, you start to go, ‘This is a great idea.’
“And it’s like, wait, people get tattoos of each other’s initials all the time,” Hammer added. “I’m not performing surgery, you know, it’s like all of these things in a consensual relationship that were pre-discussed and all of these things that were consented to whatever they might have been between two people.”
Acknowledging that there are “obviously limits in terms of we want to keep people safe,” Hammer claimed that he and his former partners had set up negotiations and safe words, “one for pause, one for stop.”
“Pause is like, ‘I’m feeling a little overwhelmed, but I don’t want to stop,’” he said, “like, ‘Just give me a sec because this is intense.’”
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Asked by Maher if he actually did stop at the women’s request, Hammer responded: “100 per cent because that’s essential for people to engage in sort of like intense behavior.”
Maher then suggested that Hammer was “into the [women’s] pain.”
“Well if someone is a masochist, then when they’re not feeling good, they’re feeling good,” Hammer replied. “You don’t engage in stuff like this with someone who doesn’t enjoy it.”
Questioned by Maher why he doesn’t just have plain sex, Hammer said: “I think a lot of the behavior that I was engaging in was coming from extenuating circumstances, whether it be you know, a certain displeasure about my own life, whether it be fueled by abuse.”
Hammer previously came out with his own allegations of sexual abuse, claiming that he was molested when he was 13 years old.
“It was [by] a member of clergy,” he told Maher, disclosing that the abuse had gone on for about a year.
During a podcast interview last month, Hammer said he was “grateful” for the social media furor.
“I’m actually now at a place where I’m really grateful for it because, where I was in my life before all of that stuff happened to me, I didn’t feel good,” he said on the Painful Lessons podcast.
“I never felt satisfied. I never had enough. I never was in a place where I was happy with myself, where I had self-esteem.”
Hammer said he joined a 12-step program after the allegations surfaced as they caused both “an ego death” and “a career death”.
“It’s almost like a neutron bomb went off in my life,” he said. “It killed me, it killed my ego, it killed all the people around me that I thought were my friends that weren’t – all of those people, in a flash, went away.
“But the buildings were still standing. I’m still here, I still have my health, and I’m really grateful for that.”
If you have been raped or sexually assaulted, you can contact your nearest Rape Crisis organisation for specialist, independent and confidential support. For more information, visit their website here.
