Efrosina “Effie” Angelova, who in 2021 accused Armie Hammer of abusing and raping her, has hit back against the actor’s recent interview in which he said he tried to commit suicide.
Two years ago, multiple women came forward to accuse Hammer of bad behavior. At least two additional women besides Angelova—Hammer’s exes Paige Lorenze and Courtney Vucekovich—have accused him of abuse. None of the women have filed criminal complaints, and Angelova is the only one of these women to accuse Hammer of rape. Hammer has denied the women’s allegations from the beginning; as he announced his departure from the Jennifer Lopez rom-com Shotgun Wedding, he called them “bullshit claims” and said he would not respond to them. Last week, however, the actor sat down with Air Mail to do just that, opening up for the first time about the scandal.
During the interview, Hammer repeated his denial that he’d ever engaged in or derived pleasure from the idea of nonconsensual sex. When asked if it’s fair to say he was emotionally abusive to his accusers, the actor replied, “One million percent.” He further revealed that at the age of 13, a pastor sexually abused him. And he said that in the wake of the women’s abuse allegations against him in February 2021, he attempted suicide.
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“I just walked out into the ocean and swam out as far as I could and hoped that either I drowned, or was hit by a boat, or eaten by a shark,” Hammer told Air Mail. “Then I realized that my kids were still on shore, and that I couldn’t do that to my kids.”
On Monday, Angelova wrote on Instagram that the way Hammer deployed the anecdote felt “manipulative.” She also claimed that he’d told her the same story before she’d spoken out publicly. (Although her post is no longer available, The Daily Mail has screenshots.) “It made me so worried about him, he made me feel bad for telling him his abuse messed me up,” Angelova wrote of his ocean story, adding that after hearing it, she wanted “to take care of him instead.”
“He disappeared for a couple days” afterward, she added, “which only made me more worried about him.”
“Now he claims his ocean story happened after I spoke out publicly,” she wrote. “It seems so manipulative because he knows his ocean story shut me up last time and evoked sympathy and it’s like now he’s trying it again. I think on some level he feels guilty.”
In March 2021, Angelova gave a press conference in which she claimed Hammer once raped her for hours. “During those four hours, I tried to get away, but he wouldn’t let me,” she said. “I thought that he was going to kill me. He then left with no concern for my well-being. I was completely in shock, and I couldn’t believe that someone I loved did that to me.”
Standing beside Angelova at the press conference was famed attorney Gloria Allred; the attorney and Angelova have since parted ways. Last September, Angelova criticized Allred’s participation in the docuseries House of Hammer, a project she called “disgusting,” while a source told Us magazine that in spite of reporting that Angelova had fired her attorney, it was Allred who fired her client because she would not sign a declaration of her allegations under perjury.
The Hammer allegations have become one of the darkest Hollywood scandals in recent memory. Tabloids have covered every allegation in excruciating detail, Vanity Fair published a lengthy exposé on the Hammer family in May 2021, and last fall, the story became a three-part documentary on Discovery+. That might be thanks, in part, to the explosive nature of the unverified text messages that began to spread on Instagram when the news first broke, in which the actor purportedly professed his enthusiasm for cannibalism fantasies, slave fantasies, and mutilation. “I am 100% a cannibal,” one of the messages read. Another: “You just live to obey me and be my slave… I will own you. That’s my soul. My brain. My spirit. My body. Would you come and be my property till you die?”
When Angelova and the other women first came forward, Jessica Ciencin Henriquez—a writer previously linked to Hammer soon after his divorce—voiced her support for the alleged victims. “If you are still questioning whether or not those Armie Hammer DMs are real (and they are) maybe you should start questioning why we live in a culture willing to give abusers the benefit of the doubt instead of victims,” she wrote. “Because some of you made it to adulthood without knowing what this is. Abuse: cruel and violent treatment of a person or animal.”
