Conservatives cheered when Ashton Kutcher won a Teen Choice Award in 2013 and used his time at the podium to talk about the importance of hard work. There he was receiving the “Ultimate Choice Award” — the biggest one of the night — and his remarks included pro-work statements like, “I believe that opportunity looks a lot like work.”
To date, the speech has been viewed over three million times on YouTube.
Well, Kutcher’s doing it again. Earlier this week, the actor and entrepreneur spoke on the Senate floor about the fight against human-trafficking. Actually, he did more than speak — he broke into tears. He referenced a video he had watched involving a very young girl who, as he put it, “was so conditioned by her environment that she thought she was engaging in play.”
The girl was in the same age range as Kutcher’s own children, both of whom are younger than three years old.
The man in the video was an American sex tourist in Cambodia, and the girl was in the same age range as Kutcher’s own children, both of whom are younger than three years old. His son, Dimitri, was just born in November. Both children are with his wife, former co-star Mila Kunis.
Fully aware of the public’s fatigue with celebrities who talk politics, Kutcher tempered his testimony by acknowledging that the “go back to your day job” slam from fans was fine by him. His day job is working at THORN, he made clear. It’s the organization he co-founded that develops technology to battle the very technology that can in many cases facilitate human trafficking.
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Kutcher told NBC News of the workings of THORN, “Technology can be used to enable slavery, but technology can also be used to disable slavery. The technology we’re building is efficient, nimble [and] enduring, and it only gets smarter with time.”
Kutcher has been interested in the tech world for a very long time. If you didn’t glean that from the days of his omnipresent Nikon commercials, one need only look at his track record as an investor. It includes backing companies such as Skype and Foursquare. (He also starred as Steve Jobs in the 2013 biopic, “Jobs.”)
But THORN is clearly where this actor feels he is making a real difference.
He cited examples while testifying of several law enforcement agencies that have used a beta version of THORN’s software to prioritize their caseloads and cut down on investigation time. He added that “many agencies are severely understaffed and under-resourced when it comes to human trafficking, and technology can make their jobs easier.”
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One of the organization’s programs, Spotlight, purports to shorten investigations from three years to three weeks. Kutcher was actively seeking more funding at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
CNN quoted Kutcher as saying about the new technology, “It’s working. In six months, with 25 percent of our users reporting, we’ve identified over 6,000 trafficking victims — 2,000 of which are minors.”
The “Two & A Half Men” and “That ’70s Show” star — you can also catch him on Netflix, on a series he co-created called “The Ranch” — did make sure to mention his second job while testifying: father. Lest you think it is parenthood serving as the catalyst for Kutcher’s THORN, know this: It was actually founded in 2009, along with his then-girlfriend Demi Moore.
In a lighter moment from the hearing, Kutcher jokingly blew a kiss to Arizona Sen. John McCain. The moment has gone viral on social media and fortunately brought attention to what Kutcher was actually there to talk about.
The video of the actor’s impassioned plea to the Senate looks to rival the views of his “hard work” acceptance speech from, of all places, the Teen Choice Awards of 2013. At one point during his testimony — his voice shaky — he spoke of the vision of that little girl he mentioned haunting him and how it has kept him up at night.
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Interestingly, at a time when many celebrities — from James Franco to Madonna and Lena Dunham — are plaguing social media with accounts of their depression due to the election results, Kutcher appears to have a real reason to be depressed. Yet, he is using what he’s seen, what he knows and what he’s learned to do good.
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