Armie Hammer is trending on Twitter proper now, however not for any causes you’d anticipate. Not due to a brand new mission, or due to his friendship with Name Me by Your Title costar Timothée Chalamet, or due to his divorce with Elizabeth Chambers.
You’ve got been warned.
Hammer is trending for causes that may give any publicist that “Mondays, am I proper?” feeling: Screenshots are circulating on-line from an account that claims to indicate the actor chatting with ladies in a method that’s sexually domineering and violent. A number of the messages, which Glamour will not hyperlink to right here, converse of ingesting blood, describe scenes of sexual management, and reference cannibalism.
There isn’t any proof that the messages are actual. Expertise exists such that the typical particular person can simply mock up a screenshot of direct messages or impersonate a celeb on-line. The screenshots appear to have originated from a number of Instagram accounts, a few of which have since gone personal. The superstar gossip Instagram Deaux Moi revealed a screenshot from one of many profiles that had revealed the messages, claiming that the account had faked its half within the scandal.
Neither Hammer nor his reps have made any reference to the alleged messages. However rumors like “A-list actor eats human ladies” are sure to blow up the web, particularly in a cultural second when each main information story appears to be about both mass loss of life or the decline of democracy.
“Armie Hammer” trended on Twitter on Sunday night time. Hammer’s Wikipedia web page was briefly edited to learn “Armie Cannibal Hammer.” Gossip blogs and tabloids revealed screenshots of screenshots and speculated concerning the fallout for Hammer, who spent the primary week of the 12 months within the Cayman Islands with Chambers and their two youngsters. Comedians ran with the story, like an improv troupe given the suggestion “main man” and “consuming human flesh.”
“That is going to blow over,” says comic J.P. McDade, doing an impression of Hammer. “Did not one thing simply occur with…whoever the president is?” He provides: “What do you imply, unrelatable? America loves me—my ancestors threw the entire witches off of the Mayflower.” (Hammer is the great-grandson of the American petroleum tycoon Armand Hammer who, paradoxically, was named after the arm-and-hammer emblem of the Socialist Labor celebration.)
It feels inconceivable—throughout a pandemic, the Monday after People witnessed an tried coup in our Capitol—to not snigger at a hearsay {that a} main heartthrob drinks human blood. However this drama lies at a harmful intersection: humor, sexual kink, the rise of deep fakes, and the way in which we navigate allegations of sexual misconduct and rape round public figures.
A number of the alleged DMs confer with rape, although it isn’t clear within the context whether or not it is precise nonconsensual intercourse or consensual kink play that features rape fantasies. Many have famous {that a}—a lot smaller, on reflection—scandal in 2017 revealed that Hammer favored tweets about BDSM intercourse from his Twitter profile, although that does not imply these tweets are his. Author Jessica Ciencin Henriquez tweeted on Monday, “In case you are nonetheless questioning whether or not or not these Armie Hammer DMs are actual (and they’re) perhaps you must begin questioning why we dwell in a tradition prepared to offer abusers the advantage of the doubt as an alternative of victims.” Then again, if the DMs are actual and describe consensual intercourse, does not making them public mirror a critical breach of privateness that everybody, even celebrities, deserve?
Is that this a grisly #MeToo story? Or one other instance of an actor’s personal intercourse life regrettably turning into public? Or simply an elevated trolling job by a fan of vampire intercourse who did not discover the latest Twilight spin-off e book very satisfying? The truth that we will not know means you possibly can anticipate to see much more off-color Armie Hammer memes in your subsequent thousand or so scrolling periods.
