Armie Hammer

Risa Sarachan: How has your life changed since you first published your book? Casey Hammer: My life didn't really change when I self-published my book on Amazon ...

I just want to continue to be able to share my story and empower others to heal and come forward. I definitely was conditioned to believe that things were my fault, or it was easy to be erased, I mean, I watched how my grandfather destroyed my mother in court when she made the decision to leave my father. I think by having my story out there in a big way like House of Hammer is important because it opens the door and it shines a light and basically allows me to say, “This stops here. Also, you have to understand, when I was growing up there wasn’t social media, so growing up wealthy and famous at that time, was like a secret society. But because it was about not embarrassing the family and preserving that image, none of what happened got out, and so, of course, I didn’t know that what was happening to me wasn’t OK. I mean, as you see in House of Hammer, you saw me at eleven-years-old, holding a phone book up as my father shot at it, and then you see me as an adult letting my father hold a loaded gun up to my temple. And rewatching the series, you hear my grandfather on the phone with these powerful political and influential figures, or you see who attended his parties and it’s like, woah, I had forgotten about so much of that. Coming to grips with the things that had happened in my childhood and that my parents were aware of it all, was extremely hard for me and writing the book was a way to put it into a tangible place that I could hold and be like, “OK, this is real.” And by self-publishing, I controlled that narrative and was able to make it something that really was for me. Hammer: When all the news about Armie was coming out, and the press discovered that I was his aunt, I got a lot of journalists reaching out for me to comment. Fast forward to a year ago, I was working as a kitchen designer at Home Depot, and one of my coworkers was like, “Casey, there’s someone on TikTok called The Zen Blonde blowing up your life!” I remember just getting on TikTok and watching her live-read my book and just feeling like I was in a freefall, you know, that feeling you get on the death drop part of a rollercoaster? It was meant to be a way for me to acknowledge what had happened to me and make sense of the way I grew up. What I wanted was to create a platform and be an advocate for victims and survivors.