Creepy Ashton Kutcher Couldn’t Wait for Hilary Duff and the Olsen Twins to Turn 18

2023 hasn’t been kind to Ashton Kutcher but to be fair, it’s not like fate was dealing him a bad hand. Both the past and present versions of Kutcher brought it all on himself, including recording this cringe on an old episode of Punk’d that resurfaced on social media this fall. 

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The video, which has been retweeted more than 10,000 times in the past few months, featured 25-year-old Ashton singing the praises of Punk’d guest star Hilary Duff. How young was she at the time? The prank involved the 15-year-old taking a driving lesson. Here’s what Kutcher had to say about his show’s guest: “Hilary Duff is in Lizzie McGuire. She also has an album out. She’s going to be in a movie called Cheaper by the Dozen. And she’s one of the girls that we’re all waiting for to turn 18. Along with the Olsen twins.”

Yikes. In case you’re thinking Kutcher was the unwilling victim of scriptwriters and show bosses, remember that Kutcher himself was Punk’d’s executive producer. There’s no one here to blame except the man himself. And hey there, MTV — we assume you saw Kutcher’s observation and were good with it as you ran the episode on endless repeat. (It’s no defense of Kutcher to say this obsession with underage celebs reaching legal age was a thing in the early 2000s. Websites of the time featured “countdown clocks” to alert creeps the exact moment when Duff, the Olsens, Michelle Wie, Lindsay Lohan and Emma Watson turned 18.)

There wasn’t much blowback after the Punk’d episode back in the day but social media has plenty to say now.

Oh yeah, the character letter. Kutcher and his wife Mila Kunis had to post an Instagram video in September explaining why they wrote a letter in support of their That 70s Show costar Danny Masterson, the guy who was convicted of drugging and raping two women in the early 2000s. (Yep, that same era when Kutcher made his Hilary Duff video.) The couple acknowledged the letter “caused pain” but that wasn’t enough for one of Masterson’s victims. “In my opinion,” she wrote, “you’re just as sick as your ‘mentor.’”

2023 also saw the SEC file charges against Stoner Cats, an NFT animation that Kutcher and Kunis starred in and promoted. The government agency declared the project an unregistered offering of NFTs and ordered one million dollars be paid back to investors.

We can also hold Ashton Kutcher responsible for helping to launch Matt Rife’s 2023 tour and we all know how that turned out.

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All told, Kutcher played out an impressive “greatest hits” of current and past transgressions in 2023. Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for the guy to just lay low in 2024.