It’s only been three months since disturbing messages sent by Armie Hammer began circulating, in which the Social Network star described his extreme kinks and cannibalism fantasies. The online missives soon gave way to IRL allegations of rape and sexual abuse against the actor. Now, the oil heir’s infamously disturbing DMs are about to become authenticated and sold as pieces of NFT art.
Brooklyn-based artist and writer Julia Morrison is behind the project and will be selling two NFT pieces on Foundation, complete with a physical lightbox of the exchanges. Titled “Armie DM TMI NFT: Dibs on Ribs” and “Armie DM TMI NFT: Caligula Triptych,” both conversations took place last year, months before Hammer’s fall from grace.
Much like everyone else, Morrison told The Daily Beast that she was “addicted” to the news about Hammer, constantly reading the articles and comments. Despite hundreds of screenshots posted by House of Effie, who came forward last month to accuse Hammer of violently raping her, and his former girlfriends Paige Lorenze and Courtney Vucekovich publicly sharing their stories of trauma, the women were repeatedly doubted and asked to prove their experiences were true.
For Morrison, it was BS. “I’m sick of people not believing women,” she said. “I would read all the comments and it’s so triggering to see people saying stuff on the internet, like, ‘Fuck these women, we don’t believe them. They’re making it up. They’re doing it for this, they’re doing it for that,’” she said. “When I saw the House of Effie girl’s press conference, I cried.”
“I started looking into what the hell an NFT was and once I learned that it was a way to authenticate something, I said I want to make artwork out of my text messages with Armie Hammer,” Morrison explained. “The NFT is the new notary. What I’ve done is, anyone who questions the authenticity of these exchanges, I have now created light boxes with them, and I minted them as NFTs in order to say that these things are authentic and real. It’s like a checkmate.”
Hammer had first reached out to Morrison back in 2017, noting he was a big fan of her in Sarah Bahbah's photo series “For Arabella” and wanted to know if there was a place in Los Angeles that he could see them. But she didn’t see his message until March of 2020 when a friend pointed out he was following her, leading her to strike up a conversation.
The first NFT is from August 2020, where Hammer responds to Morrison’s Instagram story about how America’s top billionaires grew even richer during the pandemic. Hammer replies to her comment about eating the rich, quipping, “Dibs on the glutes muscles and ribs for smoking.”
The other interaction occurred a few months earlier, in March 2020. Hammer and Morrison discuss Anne Rice’s novel The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, which transforms the classic fairy tale into a story about how the prince made her his sex slave. “It’s like it was written for me,” Hammer wrote.
He later refers to himself as being like the sexually deviant Roman Emperor Caligula when discussing how he was in a country with “crazy royalty” and it “got really weird.”
“I have a fantasy about having someone prove their love and devotion and tying them up in a public space at night and making their body free use and seeing if they will fuck strangers for me,” he added.
Morrison landed on these specific conversations because she found them to be layered. “These are the two pieces that I chose because I want people to ask more questions,” she said. “I just can’t get it out of my head. I posted about the greatest wealth transfer we’ve ever seen in the history of humankind, and here we have this rich dude sliding into my DMs trying to lure me in.”
“As an artist, my job in the world is to take the things that happened to me and transmute them into something that makes sense. I try to find something beautiful or find some truth in the world and try to reflect society back to itself. At the end of the day, I think the texts really speak for themselves.”
“There’s not a single word that’s been exchanged that’s been deleted,” she added. “These are authentic real exchanges and by creating artworks out of them and using the NFT process, I’m putting them on the blockchain forever and ever to cement them as a token of the times we are living in.”
Morrison said she’s well aware that some people might take issue with the NFTs, but she couldn’t care less. “For anyone who thinks that I did this to him, he did this to himself,” she said.
Morrison, who is currently getting her master’s degree in screenwriting at USC, hasn’t decided what day the auction will launch, but said she wants to donate a portion of any money the NFTs garner to a charitable cause.
“I don’t want people to think, ‘She’s doing it for money,’” she explained. “I want to keep the conversation going. Armie’s press is always like, ‘He got dropped from something, he stepped away from another Broadway show… the fall of Armie Hammer.’ Well, now it’s a way to kind of shed this all into a different conversation.”
“What I’m doing is basically taking Armie Hammer’s head, I’m shrinking it, and I’m putting it on a stake on the outside of the house of #MeToo,” she continued. “This is to stand in solidarity and to say believe women and to believe these women’s stories.”
