One week after Air Mail published its interview with Armie Hammer about the horrific abuse allegations made against him in 2021, his ex-wife, Elizabeth Chambers, has broken her nearly two years of silence. Speaking with Elle, Chambers emphasized that she is, as the headline of the piece put it, “not who she married.”
In 2021, rumors and allegations about Hammer began to circulate as unverified screenshots of messages purportedly showed him writing, “I am 100% a cannibal” and “You just live to obey me and be my slave… I will own you.” Three women—Efrosina “Effie” Angelova, Courtney Vucekovich, and Paige Lorenze—came forward that year to accuse him of abuse. Hammer said at the time that he would not respond to the allegations, calling them “bullshit claims.” Speaking with Air Mail, the actor said all of his sexual encounters have been consensual and that “every single thing was discussed beforehand.”
Chambers told Elle, as she’s stated before, that she learned of the allegations at the same time the public did. “I was learning things as the public was,” she said. “I was like, ‘There are no words. What the fuck?’”
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She did not share any intimate details about her relationship with Hammer or his sexual activities; the two remain in contact, Elle notes, as they work out how to co-parent their two children, Harper and Ford. In some moments during the interview, however, Chambers can be direct; she needed only four words to describe Hammer’s behavior during their family’s quarantine in 2020.
“He was the worst,” she said.
Hammer, Chambers, and their two children wound up quarantining in the Cayman Islands, where Hammer’s father and stepmother lived. As Elle notes, Hammer previously discussed his quarantine with British GQ in the fall of 2020. Back then, he described it as “a very complicated, intense situation, with big personalities all locked in a little tiny place. … I think, to be quite frank, I came very close to completely losing my mind.”
Hammer told GQ in 2020 that when he realized how poorly he was coping, he called a friend in the U.S. who works in mental health and got a referral for a therapist. Chambers noted during her Elle interview that even in spite of all the other trials their relationship had faced, including infidelity, it was Hammer’s choice to leave the Caymans during the early months of the pandemic that effectively ended it.
Elle reports that Hammer left to help a friend restore a motel outside Joshua Tree National Park. “My heart was broken in nine million pieces, and I still drove him to the airport,” Chambers told the magazine. She filed for divorce in July 2020, Elle reports, but the divorce has yet to be finalized.
Chambers is not the only woman once linked to Hammer who has spoken out since his Air Mail interview. Two of the women who first came forward with accusations in 2021 have impugned one detail in particular: his claim that in February 2021, as the allegations first began to circulate, he attempted suicide.
“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 Hammer had previously shared that story with her before she went public with her accusations. “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,” she wrote. “I think on some level he feels guilty.”
On Wednesday, Page Six reported that in Instagram messages between Vucekovich and Hammer from June 2020, the actor described the “pressure cooker” of quarantine and seemed to tell the same story. “Long story short….I swam out really far in the ocean. Too far,” Hammer writes in one DM. “And immediately realized how bad things had gotten, got a therapist…got a plan to get out, but my plan was asinine.”
The Los Angeles Police Department told Elle it opened an investigation into sexual assault allegations made against Hammer in early 2021, and the investigation remains ongoing. The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office told the magazine that law enforcement has not yet brought a case and no charges have been filed. As Chambers and Hammer work out their co-parenting, she told Elle that she continues to support him.
“All I’ve ever wanted is for him to be sober, healthy, and happy,” she said. “And he is that. He’s really present when he’s with the kids, and that’s all I can hope for. All you want is for your children to have two solid parents, right? That’s always the goal, so anything I can do to support that, I will.”
