Ashton Kutcher and Diddy Go Way Back
Now that Sean “Diddy” Combs has been charged with sex trafficking, people are reconsidering his reputation for raucous, star-studded parties and his relationships with various A-listers. In its heyday, Diddy’s White Party was attended by everyone from Leonardo DiCaprio to Martha Stewart, but most celebrities have kept their lips sealed about what actually went down — or at least tried to. When Ashton Kutcher was asked about Diddy’s parties during a 2019 Hot Ones interview, he said, “I’ve got a lot I can’t tell,” before starting and stopping a few times. He continued, “Can’t tell that one, either … I’m actually cycling through them.”
That quote has raised some eyebrows given reports that Diddy’s parties often included drugs and people walking around naked. In another resurfaced clip from 2002, Diddy joked about locking the doors so women wouldn’t leave, describing the scene at a Diddy party as “a little kinky.” Over the years, Kutcher was something of a regular at Diddy’s events and co-hosted the White Party with the music mogul in 2009. So what exactly do we know about their relationship?
Kutcher and Diddy’s friendship has been well documented over the past two decades. During the same 2019 Hot Ones interview, Kutcher explained that he met Diddy during his days hosting MTV’s Punk’d, which began production around 2002, while Diddy was starring on another one of the network’s shows, Making the Band. “We became fast friends,” Kutcher recalled. “We used to just hang out and watch football.” The actor shared a story about a run they went on together that inspired Diddy, who was struggling to keep up, to train for the 2003 New York City Marathon.
It seems Diddy and Kutcher were particularly close in the early aughts, around the time they first met. About a month before Punk’d aired, Kutcher and his then-girlfriend, Brittany Murphy, sat next to Diddy at an NBA All-Star Game, the first of many courtside hangs to come. A few months later, the two of them did an extended intro about “hot chicks” at the 2003 MTV Movie Awards before presenting the Best Villain award to a then-13-year-old Daveigh Chase together (she played Samara Morgan in The Ring). In retrospect, the segment is about as creepy as you’d expect, right up to the point where Diddy invites Chase to an after-party on-camera:
In 2018, Kutcher and Diddy reminisced about their friendship during a joint appearance on The Late Late Show With James Corden. “We were spending a lot of time together,” Kutcher said of the first few years they spent hanging out. “By the way, if you’re a single man, there’s probably no greater human being in the world than him. We were having a lot of fun together.” (They also joked about Donald Trump stopping by one of Diddy’s parties.)
Kutcher’s ties with Diddy have also renewed scrutiny of his advocacy for victims of child trafficking, which has involved testifying in front of Congress about his work. Last year, he stepped down from his anti-sex-trafficking tech company, Thorn, amid backlash for defending his That ’70s Show co-star Danny Masterson, who was on trial for drugging and raping two women.
As Kutcher’s connections to Diddy have resurfaced, TikTok has been flooded with rumors that Kutcher and his wife, Mila Kunis, are splitting up. A source told People the rumors are “absolutely ridiculous and false” and added that Kutcher “doesn’t belong in this conversation about Diddy. Ashton has only seen Diddy in a handful of social and business events, all of which have been documented by the media.”
The Cut has reached out to Kutcher’s representation for comment and will update this post if we hear back.
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