Ashton Kutcher and the anti-trafficking grift

There Are No Girls on the Internet

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture, Technology

4.4 • 820 Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2023

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ashton Kutcher recently wrote a letter to a judge, asking for leniency for his friend and TV co-star Danny Masterson (Kelso and Hyde from That 70’s Show). It was surprising, because for the past decade Ashton Kutcher has been trying to rebrand himself as an anti-trafficking hero. Not just any anti-trafficking hero, but a tech guru type who could use the power of technology and venture capital to save the children. We take a look into his organization, Thorn. Like so many other “save the children” orgs before it, Thorn seems to be using rhetoric and misleading statistics about trafficked children to push laws that further criminalize and marginalize consenting adult sex workers.

Sex, lies, and surveillance: Something's wrong with the war on sex trafficking: https://www.engadget.com/2019-05-31-sex-lies-and-surveillance-fosta-privacy.html

Real Men Get Their Facts Straight: https://www.villagevoice.com/real-men-get-their-facts-straight/

Ashton Kutcher Claims He Helped Cops Save Way More Sex-Trafficking Victims Than Authorities Say They've Found: https://reason.com/2017/02/15/ashton-kutcher-plays-sex-worker-savior/

The bogus claim that 300,000 U.S. children are ‘at risk’ of sexual exploitation: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/05/28/the-bogus-claim-that-300000-u-s-children-are-at-risk-of-sexual-exploitation/

SEX TRAFFICKING Online Platforms and Federal Prosecutions : chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-385.pdf

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Just a heads up, this episode talks quite a bit about sex trafficking.
0:08.1	There are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative.
0:16.2	I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.
0:21.7	I am here with my producer, Mike, and we have to talk about anti-trafficking work yet again.
0:28.6	Specifically, we have to talk about actor Ashton Cutchers' anti-trafficking organization, Thorn.
0:35.2	So we've talked about this a few times on the show before. We did an
0:39.3	episode with Michael Hobbs, formerly of the podcast you're wrong about, digging into why anti-trafficking
0:44.9	work lends itself so easily to inflated numbers and grandstanding. We also did a recent episode about
0:51.3	the anti-trafficking hero fantasy film, Sound of Freedom,
0:55.3	and the dangers that occur when anti-trafficking work is treated as automatically and inherently
1:01.1	good, because if you ask any questions to or about the people who say they've dedicated
1:07.1	their entire lives to combating trafficking, you're basically on the side of the traffickers,
1:13.3	right? So I would argue that this is actually a very harmful dynamic, because trafficking is such
1:20.3	a sensitive and important issue, and because people pretty much all agree that trafficking is
1:26.4	horrible, and it creates this easy proxy
1:29.2	to get people, not to mention money, on your side if you say that you're working on combating
1:34.5	trafficking. So I would argue that all of this means that if somebody says they work on
1:40.1	anti-trafficking work, it actually should invite further scrutiny into exactly what that work
1:45.4	looks like. Case in point, Ashton Cutcher's anti-trafficking organization, Thorne. So the reason
1:52.5	that I'm talking about this now is because actor Danny Masterson, who played Hyde on the very popular
1:57.6	sitcom That 70 show, was convicted of raping two women, both of whom were former
2:02.6	members of the Church of Scientology. Danny is also a Scientologist, and survivors say that he
	...

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