““This is about the time, when I talk about politics, that the
Internet trolls tell me to stick to my day job,” the actor said. “I’d
like to talk about my day job. My day job is the chairman and the
co-founder of Thorn. We built software to fight human trafficking and
the sexual exploitation of children. My other day job is that of the
father of two, a 2-month old and 2-year-old.”
He then described joining the FBI in raids in India, Russia, Mexico and stateside in New Jersey and New York.
“I’ve seen things that no person should ever see,” he said, tearing
up. “I’ve seen video content of a child that is the same age as mine
being raped by an American man that was a sex tourist in Cambodia. This
child was so conditioned by her environment that she thought she was
engaging in play.”
He continued, “I’ve been on the other end of a phone call from my team
asking for my help because we had received a call from the Department of
Homeland Security, telling us that a 7-year-old girl was being sexually
abused and that content was being spread on the Dark Web … They’d
watched her for three years and they could not find the perpetrator, [and were] asking us for help. We were the last line of defense. An actor and his foundation were the last line of defense.”
“I had to say no and it devastated me, it haunted me,” Kutcher said,
choking up again. “For the next three months I had to go to sleep every
night and think about that little girl that was being abused and the
fact that if I built the right thing, we could have saved her. Now, if I
got that phone call, the answer would be yes.”
He then recalled the story of “Amy,” a 15-year-old girl from Oakland,
Calif., who was forced into trafficking within hours of meeting a man
in person she’d first talked to online. “This isn’t an isolated
incident. There’s not much that’s unusual about it,” Kutcher said. “The
only unusual thing is that ‘Amy’ was found and returned to her family
within three days using a tool we created … called Spotlight.”
Kutcher said the tool aids police in cutting investigation time by 60
percent, adding, “That’s my day job and I’m sticking to it.”
It wasn’t all heavy: Kutcher and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) had a lighthearted moment after his speech. “You were better looking in the movies,” McCain said.
Stu, let me ask you a question: how did you not realize until then that you had too many eggs? Nobody sells eggs in a big cloth-covered basket, so you must have done that yourself. That means you spent god-knows-how-long opening up twelve whole cartons of eggs, carefully placing each egg one-by-one inside a big basket, and then covering it with a big picnic cloth… and at no point- at no point- did you ever stop and think “gee, there might be TOO MANY FUCKING EGGS HERE”
