Armie Hammer is “grateful for every single bit” of his cannibal scandal, even the “discrepancies”

Having recently fallen off Hollywood’s radar, Armie Hammer has reached a place of zen. His 2021 scandal, in which he was accused of abuse and exposed for having a cannibalistic kink, caused “an ego death, a career death” that Hammer is now able to appreciate. “I’m actually now at a place where I’m really grateful for it because where I was in my life before all of that stuff happened to me, I didn’t feel good,” he says on the Painful Lessons podcast. “I never felt satisfied. I never had enough. I never was in a place where I was happy with myself where I had self-esteem. I never knew how to give myself love. I never knew how to give myself self-validation but I had this job where I was able to get it from so many people that I never had to learn how to give it to myself.”

Hammer owns up in the podcast to bad behavior, though he implies that not everything he was accused of was true. “People called me a cannibal, and everyone believed them. They’re like, ‘Yep, that guy ate people,’” he laughs. “Like what? What are you talking about? Do you know what you have to do to be a cannibal? You have to eat people! How am I going to be a cannibal?! It was bizarre.”

It’s accurate to say that the more sensational aspects of the scandal—namely, the cannibal fantasies about wanting to eat a woman’s heart or cook her skin—somewhat overshadowed the other details. Hammer has admitted to emotionally abusing former partners but claimed that his sexual relationships with women were consensually engaging in BDSM. Yet many of the women who had alleged relationships with Hammer said his behavior went beyond the bounds of consensual BDSM. At least one woman has accused Hammer of rape, which he denied.

Hammer previously stated that evidence existed (in the form of deleted Facebook messages) proving he was not guilty of rape. On Painful Lessons, he says he may still someday tell his full side of the story, including the “receipts” that confirm his innocence. He still believes that the backlash he experienced was “disproportionate to my behaviors,” but, “does that change the fact that my behaviors were bad, and I have to take accountability for that? No. So I take accountability for my mistakes.”

He acknowledges that his career as an actor is “nowhere” and has found a creative outlet in co-writing a script with a friend, which he wants to make possibly outside the Hollywood system. In the meantime, he professes to be happy with the slower pace of his life. “Even in the discrepancies, in whatever it was that people said, whatever it was that happened, I’m now at a place in my life where I’m grateful for every single bit of it,” Hammer says.

“It’s almost like a neutron bomb went off in my life. It killed me, it killed my ego, it killed all the people around me that I thought were my friends that weren’t—all of those people, in a flash, went away,” he explains. “But the buildings were still standing. I’m still here, I still have my health, and I’m really grateful for that.”