Armie Hammer, Justin Baldoni—Do *All* the Men of Hollywood Share the Same Approach to Spin?

 
 

By sTACY LEE KONG

Image: Shutterstock

 
 

It’s been almost exactly four years since my social media timelines basically had a meltdown over the prospect of actor Armie Hammer being a cannibal. (Which, okay, could more accurately be described as fantasizing about consuming his partners, but we all know there’s no way the internet was ever going to pass up an opportunity to call someone a cannibal.) Anyway—if you know your celebrity math, you know what that means: it’s about time for a comeback attempt.

I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if his team had set a literal alarm. News of what entertainment media quickly dubbed his ‘cannibalism-rape scandal’ (on account of the fact that the young women who came forward were actually alleging that he groomed, controlled, manipulated and sexually assaulted them, which probably more important than the cannibalism kink! But we’ll come back to that.) broke on January 13, 2021. His appearance on Your Mom’s House, a comedy podcast from married comedians Christina Pazsitzky and Tom Segura, dropped on January 1, 2025 and quickly sparked news coverage of his (self-proclaimed) burgeoning comeback. Then, Variety reported that he’d landed the lead role in Uwe Boll’s upcoming vigilante thriller, The Dark Knight, on January 7.

To be fair, Hammer did quietly launch a new podcast, the unfortunately named Armie HammerTime Podcast, back in October, and has periodically popped up on social media and other podcasts over the past few years, including Painful Lessons (a show about “the toughest challenges faced by successful individuals [that uncovers] the hard-earned lessons they've learned on their paths to success,” which is a fascinating way to frame allegations of sexual violence). But there’s something about these most recent PR moves that stand out to me. I’m sure some of this is about the fact that they’re coming in quicker succession, and seem to be gaining slightly more traction than his previous bids for public attention. But this tiny news cycle is also making me think more broadly about how men in Hollywood are using storytelling against the women in their personal and professional lives.

Don’t call it a comeback (please!)

If we were going to give Hammer’s PR strategy a rating, it would be a solid two trash fires out of five. I mean, a Uwe Boll film is not exactly a cinematic win. Boll, the famously combative filmmaker who retired in 2016 and then un-retired in 2022, has been dubbed the world’s worst director (for good reason!), so I think we can safely say this leading role is not exactly going to be Oscar-bait. And we really only have Hammer’s word to go on that his “dance card’s getting pretty full” to the point that he’s actually turning down jobs, or that Hollywood execs have revised their opinion of him. As he claimed to Pazsitzky and Segura, “the worm is turning; it takes time. It’s slow, but generally now the conversation when my name comes up with people in the industry is, ‘Man, that guy got fucked.’ And that feels really good. It’s really encouraging.”

Unfortunately for Hammer, until I see actual evidence of a career comeback, this just sounds like so much spin. But, it does illuminate the contrast between this messaging and his overall approach to talking about the allegations against him. And listen, I know this might sound weird, but I’d argue his general PR strategy has actually worked better than I expected it would—after all, we’re all still saying cannibal instead of rapist, right?

And to be clear, that’s what Hammer was actually accused of. (He denies the allegations, which never led to criminal charges.) As I pointed out back in 2021, “Effie and the other women who have shared their stories with her say that Hammer routinely tried to, or actually did, coerce them into participating in sex acts that they didn't want to. That he ignored their safe words. That he gaslit them. And that many of them were in their late teens or early 20s when it happened… Every time we share memes about cannibalism instead of talking about consent, we're minimizing what these young women say they experienced. And, we're also sending a message about who we believe when they say they've been abused—something that's especially relevant here, because we're talking about women who engaged in kinky sex with the person they say victimized them.” But, even though most news outlets eventually acknowledge the true allegations against Hammer, the reporting on his Hollywood downfall is always framed around the most salacious detail: those cannibalism rumours.

I know we can’t blame this entirely on ‘the strategy’ because this messaging wouldn’t work without some level of buy-in from the pop culture-consuming public. But from a purely PR perspective, I do think Hammer is, in a weird way, succeeding, because he has largely managed to keep the conversation in the realm of kinky sex and cheating, which he can then downplay by speaking about his journey toward personal growth. That’s basically what he did last summer when he went on Painful Lessons to say he’s “now at a place where [he’s] really grateful for” his ostracism from Hollywood, because before, he was never satisfied, happy or able to love himself, and again last week on Your Mom’s House, where he said going through this experience has given him the capacity to have “uncomfortable conversations”—on his podcast, of course.

“I’m doing it on my terms and I’m doing it authentically as myself. And that’s one of the scary things about doing this, and one of the scary things about having the podcast is being vulnerable in a public way, especially having gone through what I went through where all this shit was weaponized against me, is really fucking scary,” he told Pazsitzky and Segura. “But I’m leaning into it because I know that the things generally that make me feel afraid are the things that I gotta go towards in order to grow.”

I mean, sure Armie. You grow, girl. But also, your kinks being ‘weaponized’ against you was not the actual problem here!

Doesn’t this self-help-style chatter sound so, so familiar, though?

If the first thing I thought when I saw the stories about Hammer’s supposed career moves was, “ugh, not the cannibalism again,” the second thing I thought was “ugh, the Justin Baldoni of it all.” That’s because personal growth, unlearning toxic masculinity and becoming a better person has been Baldoni’s whole thing for years, but we are now seeing the limits of that language thanks to the ever-expanding legal quagmire involving him, Blake Lively, their respective companies, the New York Times and various PR people. Suddenly, his TED Talk and podcast and books and man bun-sporting Nice Guy™️ brand feel just as genuine as Hammer’s musings about the necessity of ego death and his subsequent rebirth as an (apparently) better person.

(Sidenote: For anyone who needs a refresher on this news cycle, which has kind of ebbed and flowed since August, when It Ends With Us came out and the internet caught wind of a so-called ‘feud’ between Baldoni, who co-stars in and directed the movie, and Lively, who co-stars in and co-produced it, The Independent did the lord’s work by breaking it down in great detail.)

A caveat: I am not particularly invested in anything Lively says or does, and I know that she also has highly-paid PR people on her team. And no, I have not forgotten about the plantation wedding. I’m also not a lawyer, so I’m not trying to make claims about the credibility of either Baldoni or Lively’s lawsuits—though I will say, a Meghan Twohey byline does immediately make me inclined to trust the journalism in that story, which is a point in Lively’s favour, I guess. Instead, the connection I’m trying to make is about the way Baldoni is crafting his narrative, and why I think it exists on the same spectrum as Hammer’s PR strategy. That is to say, for all the work Baldoni has done to build his brand as a ‘good man,’ when he felt threatened, he had no problem relying on the same type of misogyny as Hammer—or deflecting any personal responsibility. Even though this is exactly what he’s critiqued for years!

This is probably not surprising. As Jill Filipovic argued in Slate, “too often, the men who see women as vulnerable creatures to be saved are the same ones incapable of realizing they’re taking part in the broader constellation of misogyny that puts us at risk. But when a woman pushes back—and asserts that certain conduct isn’t appropriate or welcomed—that action still becomes the greatest threat of all. Blake Lively’s simple resolution to improve workplace misogyny poked at a power structure so entrenched that even a man who wants to be seen as a male feminist would readily hire a crisis PR campaign to smear her into submission.”

What’s particularly disturbing to me is that this shit works. Still! More from Filipovic: “Baldoni and Wayfarer’s version of events, as detailed in the new lawsuit, is a funhouse mirror of Lively’s. In her telling, sexual harassment is clear. In theirs, the interactions were professional, or simply personal, but not in any way inappropriate. And so this is where we are, in 2025, post-#MeToo, three decades after the Anita Hill hearings: still quibbling over what sexual harassment even is.” I’d also add that we are in a post-Depp v. Heard era, and that highly publicized, very recent court case clearly illustrated just how happy people—even so-called feminists—are to glom onto the idea of an evil woman who’s out to take down an innocent man. It also provided a gameplan for any man looking to undermine a woman’s story of abuse through garden variety misogyny, whether that’s Marilyn Manson’s (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to sue Evan Rachel Wood for defamation, or Brad Pitt’s savvy public relations manoeuvrings against Angelina Jolie, or regular people who are increasingly using the threat of legal action to silence the women who accuse them of sexual violence, as Harvard’s Civil Liberties Law Review pointed out last year. (The Intercept has also reported on the rise of defamation suits being used as a type of “quiet but effective legal backlash” leveraged against “those who spoke out about sexual harassment and abuse.”)  

So yes, I could easily have said ‘the Johnny Depp of it all’ or ‘the Brad Pitt of it all’ at the beginning of this section. Because regardless of the male celebrity I’m name-checking, the throughline is the same: the narratives they are attempting to craft against a woman, how predictably sexist the stories are—and how eager the public is to believe them.

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CelebrityStacy Lee KongArmie Hammer, Justin Baldoni, Blake Lively, Amber Heard, Johnny Depp, Marilyn Manson, Evan Rachel Wood