"I thought that he was going to kill me." So says a 24-year-old woman who claims actor Armie Hammer violently raped her for more than four hours in 2017. The woman identified as Effie spoke at a virtual news conference with attorney Gloria Allred on Thursday, the same day Los Angeles police confirmed Hammer was the suspect in a sexual assault investigation opened Feb. 3. Effie said her relationship with the actor, 34, "progressed rapidly" after she met him on Facebook in 2016. "It is now clear to me he was employing manipulation tactics in order to exert control over me until I started to lose myself," she said, per BuzzFeed News. "He would often test my devotion to him, slyly removing and crossing my boundaries, as he became increasingly more violent." She said Hammer raped her on April 24, 2017, while repeatedly slamming her head into a wall and beating her feet with a crop, per the Los Angeles Times.
"I tried to get away, but he wouldn't let me," said a tearful Effie. But she said she "tried so hard to justify his actions, even to the point of responding to him in a way that did not reflect my true feelings." Hammer attorney Andrew Brettler shared a screenshot of a text message Effie allegedly sent Hammer in July 2020, expressing "graphic sexual requests," per the Times. Brettler pointed to Effie's "fetishes," noting all of Hammer's sexual encounters have been "completely consensual, discussed and agreed upon in advance and mutually participatory." However, two other women claim Hammer pressured them into BDSM acts, per the Times. Allred is challenging Hammer to present all of his communications with Effie, who is believed to be behind the Instagram account that previously shared messages said to be from the actor. One read, "Raping you on your floor with a knife against you ... I felt like a god." (Hammer's agency already dropped him.)
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