LOS ANGELES — Ashton Kutcher took to Twitter early yesterday to slam The Village Voice after it published an article criticizing his campaign against underage prostitution in the US.
A furious Kutcher — aka @aplusk — let rip in a series of tweets to his more than 7 million followers responding to the report in the weekly magazine that questioned statistics he used about the number of child sex slaves in the United States.
He wrote, “Hey @villagevoice if you ever want 2 have a productive conversation about how 2 end human trafficking as oppose to belittling my efforts lmk [let me know].”
Referring to the classified advertising Web site backpage.com — which is owned by Village Voice Media, the same company that publishes The Village Voice — he added:
“Hey @villagevoice you keep collecting the check from Selling Girls on Backpage and leave helping them to people who give a F*ck.”
Kutcher — star of Fox’s “That ’70s Show” and MTV’s “Punk’d” — warned the magazine, “Hey @villagevoice I’m just getting started!!!!!!!! BTW I only PLAYED stupid on TV.”
The magazine article described Kutcher as a “technically literate, if ill-informed, advocate” who “made his bones playing the prankster, dummy and stoner.”
Kutcher added, “Hey @villagevoice REAL MEN DON’T BUY GIRLS and REAL NEWS PUBLICATIONS DON’T SELL THEM.”
The Voice’s Twitter feed returned serve: “Wow, @plusk having a Twitter meltdown,” it said. “Hey Ashton, which part of the story is inaccurate?”
It added: “OK @plusk, we’ll bite. Tell us the hard facts that you have collected. We’ll fact-check them.”
When there was no response, the Voice tweeted, “Where’s you fight now @plusk?”
Kutcher has been at the forefront of a campaign to highlight the issue of underage prostitution, with the “Dude, Where’s My Car?” star heading up a series of advertisements with the theme “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls.”
The lengthy article in The Village Voice claimed the figure of “100,000 to 300,000 children” sold for sex in the United States — which Kutcher and wife Demi Moore relied upon during an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan — was a wild overestimate.
The magazine said the figure actually relates to the number of young people “at risk” of falling into prostitution, and that its own research showed 8,263 arrests across the United States for child prostitution in the past 10 years.