Some of Ashton Kutcher’s friendships have caused controversy.
Kutcher and Sean “Diddy” Combs have been friends since the early 2000s after meeting on the set of Punk’d.
“It started over Punk’d cause he’s like, ‘You can’t punk me.’ I was like, ‘I don’t know what to tell you, everybody’s on the table.’ So, that started our conversation,” Kutcher recalled on “Hot Ones” in 2019, adding that their interaction led them to become “fast friends.”
Diddy faced controversy after the musician’s two homes in Los Angeles and Miami were raided by Homeland Security in March 2024, reportedly in connection with federal sex trafficking allegations. (Diddy has previously been accused of sexual assault by multiple men and women since ex-girlfriend Cassie filed a lawsuit against him in November 2023, which has since been settled. He has denied all of the allegations.)
Kutcher is reportedly expected to be subpoenaed as part of the sex trafficking investigation, per the Daily Mail.
Keep scrolling to see more of Kutcher’s inner circle:
Diddy
Kutcher and Diddy met on the set of Punk’d in the early 2000s and have been friends ever since.
“I’ve got a lot I can’t tell,” Kutcher said in a “Hot Ones” interview in 2019 after being asked about Diddy’s parties. “I can’t tell that one either.”
Danny Masterson
Kutcher and his wife, Mila Kunis, became friends with Masterson while filming That ‘70s Show from 1998 to 2006. Masterson and Kutcher went on to star in the Netflix series The Ranch until Masterson was written off the series in 2017 after he was accused of sexual assault by multiple women during his time on the sitcom. In June 2020, Masterson was arrested and charged with three counts of rape, which he pleaded not guilty. Following a mistrial in November 2022, Masterson was later convicted on two counts of forcible rape and sentenced to 30 years behind bars in September 2023.
In September 2023, it was revealed that Kutcher and Kunis penned a letter of support to Judge Charlaine F. Olmedo ahead of Masterson’s sentencing.
“As a friend, Danny has been nothing but a positive influence on me,” Kutcher wrote in the letter, obtained by The Underground Bunker at the time. “Over [a] 25-year relationship I don’t ever recall him lying to me. He’s taught me about being direct and confronting issues in life and relationships head-on, resolving them, and moving forward.”
Following backlash from their letters of support, Kunis and Kutcher took to Instagram to explain why they penned the notes.
“We are aware of the pain that has been caused by the character letters that we wrote on behalf of Danny Masterson,” he said in the clip. “A couple of months ago, Danny and his family reached out and they asked us to write character letters to represent the person we knew for 25 years so that the judge could take that into full consideration, relative to the sentencing.”
Kutcher noted that the letters were only “intended for the judge to read” and were not meant to “undermine the testimony of the victims or re-traumatize them in any way.”
Reese Witherspoon
Witherspoon and Kutcher became close friends while filming the romantic comedy Your Place or Mine, which released on Netflix in February 2023.
“He loves his family so deeply and really is such an incredible dad who shows up every day for his kids,” Witherspoon told Esquire in a January 2023 interview. “There is no pretense. He is just very comfortable in his own skin. And did I mention he is hysterically funny?”
Michael Kutcher
Ashton and his twin brother, Michael, who suffers from cerebral palsy, drifted apart for several years, but they have since created a stronger bond.
“There was a moment in all of this where I moved to New York and was starting to get some traction with my career and Mike came out to visit and stay and he looked at me and he said, ‘Every time you feel sorry for me, you make me less,’” Ashton recalled during an episode of The Checkup With Dr. David Agnus in December 2022. “He said, ‘This is the only life I’ve ever known, so stop feeling sorry for the only thing I have.’ And that then created an entire shift back to where I think we are today, which is straight up equals. That’s it.”
Thomas Rhett
Kutcher, a longtime country fan, connected with Rhett during a country music festival.
“Someone that I have met maybe outside of the music world that I would not in a million years have guessed they were a fan would be Ashton Kutcher,” Rhett told his record label, Big Machine Records, in a March 2019 blog post. “From that we kind of spurred a relationship. I remember him and his wife, Mila Kunis, which is crazy, invited me and [my wife] Lauren to dinner one night in L.A. And we’re sitting there going, ‘Are we seriously about to go to dinner with them? Like, this is nuts.’”
Rhett said him and his wife immediately hit it off with the celebrity couple and the’ve become “decently close” with them.
“Never in a million years would have dreamed that one of my favorite actors would have been a fan of mine without ever meeting before,” he added.
Kutcher even joined Rhett on stage during his Stagecoach set in May 2022.
Dax Shepard
Kutcher and Shepard met on the set of Punk’d and reunited several years later when both their wives, Kunis and Kristen Bell, costarred in the 2016 comedy, Bad Moms.
“Dax and I came and, like, gave them flowers… it was funny became it kind of like re-kickstarted our friendship because we’d done Punk’d together years and years ago and after we hung out on the show, we’re like, ‘God, I really like hanging out with [you],’” Kutcher said in a December 2018 appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres show, adding that he later invited Shepard to star with him on The Ranch. “Now we hang out everyday.”
