In a 2009 HuffPost essay, Ashton Kutcher recounts how he and Demi Moore decided that they wanted to find a humanitarian cause to promote and support together. “We were continually confronted with one issue that pulled at our heartstrings and haunted our thoughts: the abolition of 21st-century slavery,” he wrote. As they learned more about the issue, they became particularly horrified by the child sex trafficking trade. To raise awareness of the practice, they founded The Demi & Ashton (DNA) Foundation. Kutcher told Reuters that the organization was their Valentine’s Day gift to each other in 2010, and as one of their first altruistic acts, they sent flowers to victims of human trafficking.
“It just seemed impossible to live in a world where that was going on and not, you know, do something about it,” Moore said during a 2011 appearance on “Piers Morgan Live.” According to Kutcher, Twitter served as the perfect platform for promoting their cause because many traffickers use the internet to operate. “So if we can motivate people while they are online to do something about that, then we can make a dent,” he said.
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Even after the couple split, their foundation’s fight to end human trafficking continued. Its name was later changed to Thorn, and in 2017, Kutcher testified before a U.S. Senate committee about how the organization had created software that had been used to find thousands of trafficking victims via the internet, per KTLA5.
