KILLED - Episode 4: The Actor

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

A celebrity gossip teases an exposé on embattled actor Armie Hammer. But the piece never runs, and the rumor mill kicks into overdrive. Featuring Anne Helen Petersen and Allie Jones. To submit your KILLED story, visit www.KILLEDStories.com.

This episode discusses sexual assault and other topics not suitable for young audiences. Please take care while listening. This sort of dates back to the beginning of 2020 and the beginning of the pandemic. Duma, this anonymous Instagram account, collects user-submitted gossip and then repostsed on Instagram stories. So it's only up for 24 hours. You kind of have to watch it in real time to get the juice, and then it's gone. Army Hammer's wife filed for divorce in the summer of 2020. And then in January of 2021, another anonymous Instagram account that came out

started making some claims about Army Hammer releasing like DM's that he had purportedly sent to her that were sort of sexual in nature bdsm kink type stuff doom wall started reposting things some of these claims were that you know he had a cannibalism fetish and just things that you don't ordinarily hear about a major a-list actor. Then, Domo gets a tip that there's a big exposé coming in the LA Times. Devastating Army Hammer News in coming. And then she's posting, it's coming tomorrow.

Thinking it's tomorrow. It's coming next week. What she finally landed on was that they were going to run this story the Monday after the Super Bowl. So this would have been in February of 2021. He will not under any circumstances recover from what's about to come. Oh my god. All of his reps are dropping. The drum beat is getting louder. Oh, this is going to be so good. I mean bad. But the story never came. Hi, FYI, the LA Times Army story got killed.

It's not happening. Peace is killed. Kill, kill, kill. It's literally non-existent. Holy shit. From Justine Harmon and AudioChuck, this is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. the podcast that brings dead stories back to life.

Episode 4. The Actor It takes a village to create a proper celebrity. Teams of strategists and experts and stylists are consulted on every facet of the image. Does the actor take off his shirt in magazine editorials or does he politely refuse to be objectified? Does he kiss and tell in interviews or does he value his privacy? Does he weigh in on politics

or does he keep his handsome mouth shut? These are the kind of things that traditionally get hammered out in on politics, or does he keep his handsome mouth shut? These are the kind of things that traditionally get hammered out well before a wannabe star ever tackles his first step and repeat. But in the last few years, as social media has rested public image from traditional gatekeepers, the landscape has only gotten more complicated. These days, it's not publicists, studio execs, or even high-powered editors

who create a celebrity's image alone. For someone to really reach that, like, a list, status, a lot of things have to line up. Instagram is huge. That's Ali Jones. She's a journalist who writes the sub-stack gossip time. Ali interviewed the then anonymous woman behind Red Hot Gossip Account, Du Moir, for the

New York Times in 2020. Back in May, some guy revealed her supposed identity in a newsletter. You can Google it. This was in about the fall of 2020 and she had become extremely popular at that point. You know, hundreds of thousands of followers. And she was very clear about what she thinks her role is. And that is not as a reporter, not a journalist. Someone who's simply sort of mediating this information, someone will anonymously say,

hey, Army Hammer's doing this. And she reposts it and it goes from there. Ali can tell you anything you want to know about celebrity gossip, like exactly who Army Hammer was in the Hollywood universe before she'd hit the fan. One of the first pieces of press that Army Hammer did, this was around, I want to say like 2008 or 2009, was in Vanity Fair as one of the like 25 heirs and erases of America, you know the hottest young heirs I guess because his family was in the oil business He has just like a little quote in that story talking about however since he saw home alone when he was the kid

He dreamed that he was you know McCulley Culkin and he was the star and he dreamed that he was, you know, McColley-Calkin and he was the star and that's what he's always wanted. And I think that definitely shows over the course of his career since then. Army Hammer's Blue Blood Pedigree combined with storybook Good Looks instantly cemented him as a leading man. Square-jawed, greatness suit,

even better with day old stubble. The pleasantly virile antidote to the milk toast Disney Prince. That is of course, until Super Bowl weekend, 2021, when the Du Mois account teased that a bombshell expose about the star's alleged checkered and violent past was on its way. On February 6th, 2021, Du Mois reposted an anonymous submission. I can 100% confirm there will be an LA Times article on A.H. Many victims have given statements and have the proof to back it up. It's definitely not looking too good for that guy. With one repost,

it seemed as if Du Moir had all but shattered the handsome princes looking glass. What happened next was a kill so messy and so inherently modern that it shook a carefully calibrated industry to its core. We're in an era of unprecedented star control and it is very rare that scandal breaks through. That's Anne Helen Peterson. She is a PhD in celebrity gossip. No, seriously. I got a PhD in celebrity gossip,

which actually means that I got a PhD in celebrity gossip, which actually means that I got a PhD in media studies, but my research and expertise is on the last 100 years of celebrity gossip. These days, she says, celebrities are at peak control. The stars have essentially taken back their own paparazzi in the form of their own Instagrams, their own Twitter, their own social media, they are able to control and shape the narrative and essentially do not need a gossip apparatus. I actually think what we saw happen with Army Hammer was a really

interesting deviation from that standard. And has always been obsessed with the cultivation and deconstruction of celebrity. And back in 2017, she first turned a critical eye to Army Hammer and his expertly crafted image for Buzzfeed. She called the story, 10 long years of trying to make Army Hammer happen. It was essentially what we'd call an academia star study, where you look at all of the magazine articles, all of the interviews that a star has ever done. So I went on eBay and I ordered every single magazine that you can find that had him on the cover.

So I have a copy of Cowboys and Indians magazine, which is an actual magazine that they sell out in the West. And then you go into the databases and look for all of the small interviews that he's done with local newspapers and international newspapers. And it allows you to see patterns in the sort of topics and the way that celebrities talk about different parts of their lives, different parts of their back story, all that sort of thing.

And so no matter what kind of star it is, you can always find these interesting corners and patterns and stories that emerge. And so with Army Hammer, I was really interested in the fact that, as eventually became the title, that Hollywood kept trying to make him happen. And what I mean by that is that it actually is like a very old-school Hollywood thing where they used to take a star and they would slot him into different types of roles trying to figure out like, oh is this his image? Oh is this his image? Oh maybe he's this. What emerged was that despite having several cracks at the big leagues,

army hammers blockbusters like the lone ranger often tanked in the Buzzfeed piece, Anne also touched on the actor's quote, undertones. She wrote, quote, there are fetish undertones, like his documented affection for BDSM and ropes. Yet, for the bulk of Hammer's career, those undertones have been overlooked and overshadowed by the mainstream and altogether unremarkable Hollywood narrative around him. by the mainstream and altogether unremarkable Hollywood narrative around him. End quote. This kind of image cultivation, it's old hat for Hollywood. The Carrie Grant that we think of now as this like,

swav, debonair, charming, kind of like tongue and cheek in some ways, witty, all of those characteristics, they had a test, they had to hone in on what he was going to be, studios did the same thing for someone like Clark Gabel before arriving at his more lumberjack image that became the standard image going forward in the 1930s and 40s.

And with Arby Hammer, contemporary Hollywood, their version of that was like, let's try putting an army armor in a different blockbuster every year Because this guy is so handsome and he has this incredible jawline, right? Like he looks like a Hollywood star Why it seems like it should happen, right? It seems like he should have this career and It just kept not happening Well, here's the thing.

When I wrote that piece, I actually thought he was pretty beige. There was never any part of my mind that thought like, this guy's hiding something. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. In 2017, three months before Call Me by Your Name hit theaters, journalist and celebrity gossip PhD Anne Helen Peterson observed that after nearly a decade of lukewarm flops, Army Hammer was finally happening. There had been Oscar Buzz building

around that performance and call me by your name. And so I thought it was an interesting opportunity to think like, oh, okay, so here's a guy that they've tried in all of these different blockbusters. They've tried him in, you know, a 10-pull summer movie. I would have him to make it look like the convention violated the treaty. Something to do with what my brother found in the desert. And they've tried him in like a

007 style throwback movie. Don't you make me put you over my knee? So you don't want to dance. They've tried different scenarios and it hasn't worked. Please pardon our duress and afraid my valet and I were robbed by bandits. So let's try an indie character-building movie, right? Like a low-key, against type, and in so much as he was playing a character who was gay, and that was not part of the image that had been cultivated before.

All to see without my eyes. In Call Me By Your Name, Hammer plays a winning, if not sexually manipulative. Twenty-something grad student, who falls in love with a teenager, played by Timothy Shalamey. The movie prompted a rabid discourse

surrounding statutory rape, representation, consent, and whether or not it's hot to eat a peach filled with jizz. And then we're making out, and then we're making out, and then we're making out, and making out, and no one's saying stop. The feedback to Anne's piece was equally passionate. I had all these trolls come after me after I wrote the piece. She says someone even threatened to slit her dog's throat. Not all fans are like this. I want to be very clear. Some fans do not want to see the

object of their adoration interrogated or analyzed in any way. Sometimes there's a struggle in online discourse or online conversations to delineate to separate between analysis and like shitting on someone. There had been an existing fandom around the book and there was a much larger air and robust fandom around the movie and his character in the movie. I didn't know that there was an army hammer like hive, right? Like I didn't know there were like very avid army hammer fans. And I don't know if they were army hammer fans so much as they were fans of this character, right?

Like it was, the fandom had become really strong around the movie. And that was what they were reacting to. So what made me think that there was something there, that there was something off, that there was more to the story, was when he responded to the piece. In response to a Buzzfeed tweet promoting the story, Army Hammer fired back at Ann. Your chronology is spot on, but your perspective is bitter AF,

he wrote. Maybe I'm just a guy who loves his job and refuses to do anything but what he loves to do. He then temporarily deleted his account and told an audience add an early screening for the film, quote, I have no impulse control. Most stars, when someone writes something about them, they're like, that person's opinion of me has nothing to do with me, right? Like, they are insulated in many ways from reading those things either with their knowledge or without their knowledge. Or if they do encounter those things,

they have learned to have this sort of skin that, like, you know, they are just like this, this is not worth me engaging in. And also, this is important too. Even if they do read it and it does piss them off, their publicists have said, don't you dare engage with that. Because it looks bad just generally for a really high-powered start to say like, how dare you critique this. You saw like a particular side of him with the way that he responded to that article,

but then you also saw, I don't know if I want to use the word arrogant, that he was pompous enough to think that he didn't need to heed his publicist suggestions, even though he was you know, on an Oscar campaign at that time. No publicist is going to say, you know what you should do to this article on BuzzFeed? You should respond to it and say that the author is bitter AF. Anne had touched on something, a glitch in the Hollywood matrix, a breach in the celebrity contract, a story, broiling under the royal image. Even though the dominant Army Hammer star image at that point was still like, you know, white teeth movie star. There had been this darker, undercurrent that had been emerging over the course of that

press cycle for a call me by your name. And then, a little over three years later, in the wake of Hammer's split from his wife of a decade, a number of women made disturbing accusations about the actor's propensity for sexual violence. He said to me he wants to break my rib and barbecue and eat it. One woman told the New York Post, �Screen shots of DMs Hammer allegedly sent made the rounds on the farthest reaches of the web.

I am 100% a cannibal, one red. I've cut the heart out of a living animal before and eaten it while still warm. The Army Hammer Cannibal Story? Yeah, it caught fire. Army Hammer has been one of the most promising actors in Hollywood, but all of that is in doubt, thanks to shocking allegations from his ex-girlfriend.

Allegation so sick, they conjure up images of Hannibal Lecter character. Like Tiger King or Ilaria Baldwin's Euro-Grift, it became something of an early pandemic artifact. Even Cannibal Cop Gilberto Valle weighed in, telling the New York Post, quote, I don't know if he could be facing legal trouble or it's just kink-shaming.

And at every turn, it seemed to get worse for the actor. Here's Ali Jones. I think his initial response to the scandal was not great. He was extremely defensive. One of the first things that happened was he dropped out of a rom-com with Jennifer Lopez, and he sort of released this like, snitty statement to the press about how, you know, he doesn't want to deal with the BS.

I think is what he said, and he's just going to step away to spend time with his family. Telling ET quote, I'm not responding to these expeditive claims, but in light of the vicious online attacks against me, I cannot in good conscience now leave my children for four months to shoot a film." And then came the Doomwa Post. On February 6, 2021, the count started posting follow-ups.

One source warned that the impending story was, quote, �So much more fucked than we all knew. But the story didn't run in the Los Angeles Times that Monday after the Super Bowl, or the following week. What was happening? Had someone pressured the paper not to publish? Had the allegations not held up? Or was the bombshell even worse

than anyone could have imagined. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. As the world waited for the Los Angeles Times to drop its bombshell exposé, breathless redditors swapped theories. Just as Anne Helen Peterson did years earlier, online detectives began to dig up old interviews, scouring the quotes for evidence of Army Hammer's gruesome predilections. In 2013, he told Elle that a woman tried to stab him with a butcher knife while they were having sex. And that same year, he'd revealed to Playboy that he, quote, liked the grabbing of the neck and the hair and all that.

A clip of Hammer bragging to Jimmy Kimmel about renovating a motel. Even led some people to believe he was connected to human remains found in the area. It was like this kind of like a band and run down motel. Though cops were quick to shut that down, Army Hammer's name hasn't come up as the suspect at all set a spokesperson for the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Office. We have no plans to investigate him. The story became a meme of itself. A salacious headline regurgitated over and over.

Anne Helen Peterson watched it all unfurl. This is what happens when you have people trying to solve a mystery on the internet. I guess what I would say is that you can't talk about what happened in reaction to this case without also keeping in mind what was going on with true crime in this moment. What it continues to go on with true crime and like the internet sleuthene that goes on, that's really why this went the way that it did.

You had a very open understanding of what could be happening. You're never going to believe, like this is the, like it's worse than you could imagine, and that opens up so many different possibilities. And then you can connect the dots. And this is like theory of scandal. It promises to tell you some hidden truth

that also illuminates a larger network of hidden truths. So I think that's how you can get to like army hammered, It illuminates a larger network of hidden truths. So I think that's how you can get to like, army hammer, talked about cannibalism and DMs to army hammer. It's part of like a serial murder case. It's very easy to think that it's part of this larger conspiracy. On March 11th,, Vanity Fair, not the Los Angeles Times, published a story titled The Fall of Army Hammer, a family saga of sex, money, drugs, and betrayal.

It went way back. Apparently in 1919, Army's great-great-grandfather Dr. Julius Hammer gave the wife of a Russian diplomat and abortion and she died. In 1996, Army's uncle Julian killed a man over gambling debt. The story also included quotes from two X's, both of whom claimed army had abused them. Of the allegations of, quote, manipulation, emotional abuse and violence, the story said, quote, those in army's camp mainly blame the scandal

on the unverified gossip account, Du Mois, which published and proliferated its army claims to more than 750,000 users in January. Quipt and anonymous friend, quote, you used to have to verify facts before making allegations like this." In response to the suggestion that she was responsible for the news cycle, Du Mois was indignant. She wrote, we broke no news, we broke no story.

We reshared information that was already posted by other accounts. She declined to participate in this series, but has previously said that she quote, feels terrible for the victims and that she'd prefer not to delve further into what happened. A week after Vanity Fair published its piece, the Lost Angelist Times finally filed its own story, which included accusations from a woman identified as Effie, who claimed that Army Hammer raped her.

On April 24, 2017, Army Hammer proudly raped me for over four hours. Los Angeles, during which her repeated leaks clad to my head against a wall, bruising my face. And though that one redditor was right, Amy Kaufman did co-write the story. It wasn't exactly a barn burner, either. Here's Ellie Jones. It's possible that whoever the tips there was that told Dumannas was happening, got their wires

crossed, and really it was Vanity Fair working on this story versus someone at the LA times. It's also possible that someone at the LA times was working on it. Vanity Fair got their story up and they decided they didn't have anything else new to add and killed it. You know, there's a number of different possibilities of why a story wouldn't run, but Dumois was wrong and that, you know, the specific expose they did not come out. Killed, contacted Amy Kaufman, the pieces author

who set reports of a scrap story were merely speculation. Of Dumois and the Reddit conspiracy theorist, she wrote, quote, they don't know what actually went down or panned out. She declined to elaborate further. But the other journalists I spoke to, like Anne Helen Peterson, had their own ideas. I think that what they published probably was at one point bigger. And at some point they had to decide, do we have enough people talking on the record to make this stand-up to scrutiny?

And or is the information that we have newsworthy? Because if the news is just like Army Hammer's dick, that's not news. That's gossip, and that has a place on the internet. It doesn't necessarily have a place like from a reporter, not a columnist, but a reporter, writing for the Los Angeles Times. This kind of thing had happened before in Hollywood. Just about a decade earlier,

with a massive star and her British rock band frontman husband. There was a lot of intrigue surrounding a story about Gueneth Paltrow that was supposed to come out in Vanity Fair around 2013, right before she and Chris Martin split up. And you know, before the story even came out, which it ultimately did not end up coming out. A lot of information about the story got leaked to like page six and the tabloids about how Gwyneth was telling people not to talk to Vanity Fair. And ultimately, um, Grayden Carter, who to talk to Vanity Fair, and ultimately,

Great Encarder, who was the editor at the time, ended up writing an editor's letter about why they weren't publishing this story. And what he said was basically that people were hoping for a big expose on Gwyneth Paltrow, and there had been so much hype surrounding this possible story about her that he felt that the story they had couldn't possibly live up to it and didn't really come up with any new information about her that we didn't already know. And that's sort of like an old school take on it even though it was just 2013, you know,

kind of before social media was as big as it is now, the chatter about a story ultimately shut it down. Ali says gossip cops like Du Moir have made it hard for traditional news outlets to do their jobs. And in many ways, easier for stars to claim plausible deniability. I definitely think the kind of anonymous gossip that Du Moir and other sort of Instagram accounts like her are putting out muddy the waters, especially on something sort of like so complex as this story which involves, you know,

differing definitions of consent when you're talking about BDSM and Kink and like, you know, what was he actually involved in and some of these women wanted to be anonymous and some of them didn't. So it's an extremely complex story. And if you're working in a newspaper, you have to meet a certain level of confirmation before you can run anything.

And when you're doing what, as she has openly said, there's no level. There's no barrier to entry in terms of putting this stuff out there. So I think it is possible that that would scare certain more major newspaper and magazine outlets off the story when there's already like so much out there kind of moneying the waters and probably unconfirmable a lot of these details. But I don't know that it would 100% kill a story, the fact that people were submitting gossip to Du Moin, but it just makes it a lot more complicated. On May 31, 2021, Army Hammer checked into rehab, quote, reportedly for drug, alcohol, and

sex issues. Six months later, on December 8, 2021, TMZ reported that the LAPD had concluded its investigation regarding the alleged rape. Within days, news circulated that Hammer had checked out of rehab. Army Hammer has never been formally charged with a crime. In a statement, his lawyer declined any wrongdoing on behalf of his client, saying that all sexual interactions were, quote, completely consensual, disgust, and agreed upon in advance and mutually participatory. End quote.

Allie Jones doesn't think we've heard the last from Army Hammer. There are a few stories at the beginning of this year in people about how he's back living with his wife. She'll always love him. You know, they're trying to work it out for their family. And I think that's just setting sort of like planting the seeds for what they probably hope is a potential comeback or at least an opportunity for him to explain himself

and maybe say, you know, my family has forgiven me and I'm in such a better place. And this and the other thing. I think if you kind of read the tea leaves a little bit with people in us weekly and what's coming out in those magazines, I'm sure he hopes that by virtue of the fact that he's been really quiet for the last six months, there might be an opportunity. And Helen Peterson is watching with one eyebrow caulked. As the celebrity machine slightly changes the algorithm

to protect its own. Why what happened with Army happened is that he was sloppy. And I think there are a lot of celebrities who are sloppy but who have good teams that clean up after them. And there also is not an aggressive gossip press. The magazines, whether it's vanity fair or people or variety, they need celebrities

more than the celebrities need them. And so that power and balance makes it so that they will not publish negative stories, aggressively negative stories, unless it is about someone who has already fallen, right? And Du Moir has emerged unscathed. At the time of reporting, the count had over 1.5 million followers. Its creator recently inked a deal for a scripted HBO show based on her upcoming novel. And in April of this year, she teased a potential comeback by none other than a quote, disgraced, be list actor. The internet thinks it's totally definitely about Hammer. Yeah, I don't think that it hurt the credibility of his sight. I think the people still are like, you know, this is good gossip.

This is like, I love to go there and think about this and like ask about people that I want to know about. But like, I don't think we actually know what did or didn't happen with Army Hammer in this story. I do think that there's more than we know, and we'll never know, probably. you