Armie Hammer's wild family history includes a $180 million fortune, New York City's biggest art scandal, and a 1955 murder

• Allegations against Armie Hammer surfaced in January of 2021.
• Since then, Hammer's family history has come under new scrutiny.

Editor's note: The story contains graphic descriptions of rape and violence.

In 2021, the Los Angeles Police Department said it had launched an investigation into Armie Hammer after a 24-year-old woman, who identified herself as Effie, accused the actor of rape.

Speaking at a press conference in 2021, Effie said Hammer, who is best known for his roles in the Oscar-winning film "Call Me By Your Name" and "The Social Network," raped her "violently" for four hours in 2017.

"I thought that he was going to kill me," she said during the press conference, which she attended alongside her lawyer Gloria Allred.

In an email statement sent to Insider at the time, Hammer's attorney Andrew Brettler denied the allegations, describing them as "outrageous" and said Hammer "welcomes the opportunity to set the record straight."

For many months prior to these allegations, Hammer had been the subject of intense social media scrutiny after he was accused of sending NSFW direct messages that involved discussions of sexual acts and cannibalism.

Since then, further details about Hammer's life, including his family history, have been laid bare in multiple reports as well as a new 2022 docuseries called "House of Hammer" on Discovery+.

Armie Hammer's father inherited a fortune estimated to be worth more than $180 million

In a 2021 exposé published by Vanity Fair, the Hammer family history is traced back to Dr. Julius Hammer, Armie's great-great-grandfather.

Julius was a Russian immigrant, who lived in the Bronx and was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and later imprisoned in 1919 after performing an abortion on a Russian diplomat's wife, who died days after the procedure.

The family's business activities, however, start with Julius' son Armand, Hammer's great-grandfather, who made a fortune by investing money he obtained from his third wife into the American oil company, Occidental Petroleum.

According to the report, Armand, who became close associates with many high-powered figures, including Prince Charles and Colonel Gaddafi, was also known for his involvement in "wide-ranging grifts," including "laundering money; using artwork to fund Soviet espionage" and "bribing his way into the oil business."

In the new docuseries "House of Hammer," which focuses on the family's controversies throughout the years, Armand's granddaughter Casey says that growing up, her grandfather was obsessed with maintaining the family's pristine public image. Per Casey, Armand had "files" on all of her friends and romantic partners, and would even record their phone calls to make sure she and other Hammer family members were behaving appropriately.

Both the Vanity Fair story and "House of Hammer" mention Armand's other questionable activities, including forcing his mistress to change her name, wear a disguise, and keep a homing device in her car after Armand's wife found out about the affair, and making an illegal contribution to the Nixon campaign that reportedly helped cover up Watergate.

Armand also recorded "decades' worth" of conversations illegally, according to both the report and docuseries.

When Armand died in 1990, Hammer's father (and Casey's brother), Michael, inherited almost all of the family's business empire, which is estimated to be worth more than $180 million. Casey was given $250,000, she said on "House of Hammer."

Knoedler Gallery, owned by the family, closed down in 2011 after a forgery investigation by the FBI

Along with the cash fortune, Michael also inherited Knoedler Gallery, a commercial art gallery in New York City. Knoedler, founded in 1846, was one of New York's most venerated institutions.

In 2009, however, the gallery made headlines after its president, Ann Freedman, stepped down as rumors about the origins of many of the gallery's paintings began to emerge within the art world.

Two years later, the gallery collapsed after an FBI investigation uncovered that between 1994 and 2009, a slew of paintings said to be made by abstract expressionist masters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning and were sold by the gallery to buyers for millions of dollars were, in fact, fakes. In total, Knoedler was accused of selling 63 forged paintings.

The forged paintings had been created by the infamous forger Pei-Shen Qian in his Queens, New York, garage. Qian reportedly used techniques such as using tea bags to stain his canvases to make the forgeries appear period-appropriate. (He claims he didn't know the paintings were being sold as the real deal.)

The paintings were bought by the gallery from a Long Island art dealer named Glafira Rosales at the instruction of Freedman (Freedman said she didn't know the paintings were fake and described herself as the "central victim"). Rosales claimed the paintings had belonged to a mysterious and well-connected art collector named "Mr. X."

Ten lawsuits were filed against the gallery, all of which were settled. However, one case went to trial in 2016 where Domenico De Sole — a Sotheby's chairman — and his wife accused the gallery of knowingly selling them a fake Mark Rothko painting for over $8 million.

The case was ultimately settled, but during the trial, a former Knoedler accountant testified that Michael had used the gallery's credit card to fund his personal lifestyle.

Expenses reportedly included a $1 million trip to Paris and the purchase of two luxury cars.

Julian Hammer, Armie Hammer's grandfather, was accused of killing a man in 1955. He was separately accused of sexual abuse by his daughter.

While Hammer's father Michael was given the keys to the family fortune, Michael's father (Armie Hammer's grandfather), Julian, who appeared to be the natural successor, was given $250,000.

Armand is said to not have cared much for Julian because he "caused too much trouble."

In 1955, Julian was arrested on suspicion of killing a man at his Los Angeles home on the morning of his 26th birthday. The charges were later dismissed. According to Vanity Fair, Armand had $50,000 in cash delivered to a lawyer in Los Angeles before the charges were dropped.

On "House of Hammer," Casey recalled being in her father's house during his raucous parties, which allegedly included underage women and "bowls of cocaine." Casey has also alleged that Julian sexually abused her as a child. She made the allegation in her self-published 2015 memoir "Surviving My Birthright" and also said Julian was abusive to other members of the family, Vanity Fair reports.

Although Julian never addressed the allegation before his death in 1996, Casey's half-sister, Jan Ward, told Vanity Fair in a statement, "I will say that I love my family very much, which includes my brother, my sister, and my nephews." She declined to comment about the allegations at the time.

Zac Ntim originally contributed to this report.