FishbowlLA

Ashton Kutcher’s July 2011 pressure campaign on Village Voice Media advertisers — and the Backpage backstory

By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, July 2011

In early July 2011, Ashton Kutcher publicly pressured Village Voice Media’s national advertisers — naming Disney, Domino’s, Columbia University, and American Airlines on Twitter — to drop their advertising relationships with the company. The proximate cause was a Village Voice article ridiculing Kutcher and Demi Moore’s “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” anti-human-trafficking campaign. The deeper context was Backpage — the VVM-owned classified-ads site that had become one of the most-cited platforms for adult-services advertising and that had repeatedly been linked to child-sex-trafficking prosecutions. The original FishbowlLA framing called VVM’s snarky-ridicule strategy a self-inflicted error.

Then

VVM’s Village Voice cover story had attacked the credibility of Kutcher-and-Moore’s Demi & Ashton Foundation, ridiculed the “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” PSA campaign, and explicitly framed the celebrity-led trafficking-advocacy work as ineffectual moralism. The piece had not contacted Kutcher or Moore for response — a structural editorial decision that the FBLA framing identified as the underlying tactical mistake.

Kutcher’s 16-hour Twitter silence followed by the targeted-advertiser pressure cycle was the kind of celebrity-social-media-pressure campaign that was still relatively new in 2011. The American Airlines response — engaging on Twitter directly with Kutcher — was a sign of how quickly major brands were learning to manage the Twitter-pressure-campaign cycle.

The deeper substantive issue — Backpage’s role in the broader online-sex-trafficking infrastructure — was the part of the conflict that VVM was attempting to deflect from. The 2010-2011 period was the substantial early-stage of the Backpage-and-child-sex-trafficking lawsuit cycle that would eventually produce major federal action against the platform.

The original FishbowlLA framing, by Matthew Fleischer, was substantively sympathetic to Kutcher’s underlying critique. The piece flagged that VVM’s editorial-and-Backpage business operation was substantively in tension — running snarky-skeptical coverage of trafficking-advocacy work while simultaneously operating a platform that had repeatedly been linked to trafficking-related prosecutions.

Now

Backpage was seized by federal authorities in April 2018, and its CEO Carl Ferrer pleaded guilty to facilitating prostitution and money laundering. Backpage’s founders Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin faced federal prosecution; Larkin died by suicide in July 2023 days before trial, and Lacey was convicted in November 2023 on money-laundering charges (with prosecutors continuing on broader charges). The 2011 critique of Backpage’s business that Kutcher and others had been making turned out to be largely vindicated by subsequent federal investigations.

Village Voice Media itself had been spun off from Backpage in 2012 (separating the print alt-weekly operation from the classified-ads platform). The print operation was then sold; the LA Weekly, OC Weekly, Village Voice, and other VVM titles all went through subsequent ownership transitions, with substantial editorial reductions across the post-2017 period. The Village Voice itself shut down in 2017 and was later revived in reduced form.

Ashton Kutcher’s anti-trafficking advocacy work has continued through the Demi & Ashton Foundation (later renamed Thorn) — the technology nonprofit he co-founded with Demi Moore to build tools targeting online child-sex-trafficking infrastructure. Thorn has continued to operate as one of the more substantial anti-trafficking technology nonprofits across the years; its work has been substantially scaled relative to the 2011-era “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” campaign. The 2018 dissolution of his marriage to Mila Kunis aside, Kutcher and Moore have both continued in the anti-trafficking advocacy space.

The 2011 piece reads now as a documented moment when the Kutcher-VVM conflict was substantively previewing the broader trajectory of the Backpage scandal that would eventually produce federal action seven years later. The Fleischer framing — flagging VVM’s structural editorial-and-business tension — was substantively vindicated by what followed.

Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.

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