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Piers Morgan Live

Interview With Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore

Aired April 17, 2011 - 21:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

PIERS MORGAN, HOST: It doesn't get more A-list than Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher. They're one of the most beautiful couples in Hollywood on screen and off.

And more than 50 films between, but beyond the glitz and glamour, here's what Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher want you to know. They're pouring their hearts into the cause of a lifetime.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DEMI MOORE, ACTRESS: What we've found is that most people aren't even aware of what is going on.

(END OF VIDEO CLIP)

MORGAN: They're working to save hundreds of thousands of children in this country and around the world who are sold for sex. And tonight they'll tell you how you can help.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ASHTON KUTCHER, ACTOR: You know those are the guys that have to stand up and say, no, real men don't buy girls.

(END OF VIDEO CLIP)

MORGAN: In their first primetime exclusive interview together. This is a special PIERS MORGAN TONIGHT.

Now this is a unique occasion. I don't think you two have ever been together for a primetime interview, have you?

MOORE: No, actually, we haven't.

KUTCHER: No, we haven't.

MORGAN: So I feel very honored. Thank you.

MOORE: Well, thank you.

KUTCHER: Thanks for having us.

MORGAN: We're going to come to the reason why you're here because it's certainly one of the reasons I want to talk to you about to start, which is obviously you've (INAUDIBLE) question about your marriage and so on. And -- but you're here to talk about sex trafficking. It's a great campaign that you've launched. We're going to come to that a little later.

Talk to me about how things are going. Because a lot (INAUDIBLE) about your relationship. I don't really know either of you very well except that when you got married, there was still a lot of cynics out there who said, it's not going to last.

MOORE: Not only that, it was written that it was a -- it was purely for publicity stunt. A pretty and long extensive --

KUTCHER: Pretty long --

MORGAN: It is.

(CROSSTALK)

MORGAN: How long have you been together?

MOORE: Eight years.

KUTCHER: Eight years?

MORGAN: Do you know -- do you feel like you're having the last laugh for all those who mocked it?

KUTCHER: Well, I feel like anyone who is sort of engaging themselves in tabloid press as fact will -- you know you'll always have the last laugh.

MORGAN: So what is it like? You're getting sort of older. And you seem to be almost getting younger. So there's kind of a morphing here. The age gap is disintegrating right before my very eyes.

(CROSSTALK)

KUTCHER: By the way, every day we have -- inside this mirror, I look in the mirror and I'm like, what is --

(LAUGHTER)

KUTCHER: You're going the other way, I'm going this way. It's certainly -- you know, it's going to be no question.

MOORE: I think that he was -- he was always older in his being. It was just, you know, he had to add a couple of years just to get some whiskers.

KUTCHER: Yes.

(LAUGHTER)

KUTCHER: Now I can actually grow like --

(CROSSTALK) KUTCHER: It's far less Keanu Reeves. You know it's like -- I'm like, I'm eliminating the Keanu patchiness of my beard as the years go by.

MORGAN: What is the secret to a happy show business marriage? And I don't mean in the context of it being a show business marriage, as the two people in show business, you happened to be married. How do you make it work?

MOORE: Well, one, I think you have to make your relationship a priority. And that's a difficult balance when you have work and, you know, the combination of a career and family. I think part of it is, I think we spend very little time apart. That's one of the key things. And --

KUTCHER: I'd also say, working on the relationship when the relationship is good. You know, as marriage goes, I think most people sort of set being -- you know getting married as the goal as opposed to being married.

KUTCHER: That's very true.

MORGAN: Which is different thing. Like, it's -- you know, just working on it when it's good. It's like not letting it go flat. And then finding things that you can work on together, like this, you know, project that we're working on, "Real Men Dump Odd Girls." It's the two of us in the trenches every day and we'll argue about it and we have --

MOORE: And we do.

KUTCHER: We're both very alpha individuals. And so --

MOORE: And equally passionate. And --

KUTCHER: And so -- but we'll argue about it but we know that what were -- what the sort of main goal is, what the big goal is, is to transform the quality of life for people. And --

MOORE: And in doing so it does that for us.

KUTCHER: Yes.

MORGAN: Is he -- is he romantic?

MOORE: I would say so.

MORGAN: Or is he ruggedly you know?

MOORE: No, he's very --

MORGAN: Tucked you over his shoulder and wheel you home for dinner?

MOORE: I think he's a little bit -- I think he's a little bit of both. But I'll say the -- you know, the type of romantic is, I have -- if you go to our house I have Post-It notes that are placed in various locations, all with messages of encouragement or love, or just thought. And some have been there, I don't know, seven years?

MORGAN: Really?

MOORE: Yes.

KUTCHER: Post-It notes are much cheaper than diamond rings.

(LAUGHTER)

MORGAN: But can often carry a lot more weight.

What's your favorite Post-It note?

MOORE: Wow, my favorite. I think -- well, they're all my favorite but my most recent one was just a reminder that I was magical.

MORGAN: You are a little old softie, aren't you?

MOORE: Yes.

KUTCHER: You could stop saying this stuff in public. Honestly, like telling people about that publicly doesn't go over very well for me.

MORGAN: (INAUDIBLE).

MOORE: No, it's --

MORGAN: Let's talk about politics. Because everything -- I think what unites you two is obviously we know you're united by Twitter, we'll come to that in a moment. But also I think politically you're very into issues. You're very into your politics. And you take that kind of thing seriously. You both campaigned pretty loudly for Obama.

Are you happy with how he's gone on?

KUTCHER: Yes, I am. You know I think he walked into a really, really turbulent situation. And I think he -- you know, as a young politician, he should have probably made some statements and took some stance and said, we're going to do this, and we're going to do this, and you got people so rallied up behind it and then met and realized there's a very serious opposition, which is, which is, you know, the other half of the country that has a very different opinion.

And negotiation is always about -- you know, about giving up on -- and you know at some level you have to say, what am I willing to give up in order to achieve what I want to achieve. And you know --

MOORE: And looking at the big picture. I mean, look, it's -- I think that in certain ways they weren't going to allow him to win. And so I think he's faced -- I think he came in to something turbulent and I think he's also faced a lot of opposition to, you know, positive chances.

And that said, he's a human being and nothing -- and no human being is perfect. KUTCHER: And he also stepped in to a suscipient (ph) task. I mean the economic ball was rolling down the hill. Right? And one guy is not going to be able to -- you know, stand in front of that ball and move it back up hill. And I would say, if you're a supporter or you're not, stop asking the president to do the job because we need to do the job.

MOORE: Yes.

KUTCHER: And by the way, you know, it's one of the reasons why I'm such a big advocate of social media, is because it allows us to participate in a very real way. You can move an issue with your own voice. And you don't have to have millions of followers. You just have to get rally support.

MORGAN: Let's come to your addiction. Because you two were the first to be addicted to Twitted. I've become quickly addicted to Twitter. I know get it.

You've got 6.5 million followers. Demi, you've got 3.5 million. I've -- I'm hovering just over the half a million so a lot of work to do. But what is it about Twitter? We had a Twitter show recently, which was fascinating, mainly because you have celebrities who just use it to promote themselves or spread gossip or whatever.

You have "New York Times" reporters reporting from the Middle East, breaking news on their Twitter about atrocities they were witnessing in the field.

When you first got into this, did you ever imagine it would become a primary new source in that way?

MOORE: No. I mea -- I think the -- we like a lot of the early adopters were just playing with it and trying to figure out, you know, what it was and how it worked. I think what was really apparent very quickly is the fact that it put you at a very proactive and a less reactive position and as it pertains to how people see you and you weren't -- you kind of had an opportunity to cut out the middle man.

KUTCHER: For me, I think I've looked at this stuff, and I thought to myself, this could be the collective consciousness. Right? Like this platform in and of itself, a little shout here and shout here, but the key was being able to drive a link into deeper, richer content into a tweet and then have that tweet be syndicated.

MORGAN: I'm going to play a little clip actually from Eva Longoria.

MOORE: OK.

MORGAN: Who I interviewed last week about you two on Twitter.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

EVA LONGORIA, ACTRESS: Demi Moore and Ashton were like, you know, the really pioneers of getting everybody on Twitter. And I remember talking to her and I said, I just can't be bothered, why do you do it. And she'd said, to control what is out there about yourself.

And I thought about that and I said, god, that is pretty smart because then you take the bounty off gossip and you take the bounty off a picture. And then I use it so much for philanthropy. And every charity that I use I use social media. And it's just -- the outreach is viral.

(END OF VIDEO CLIP)

MORGAN: I mean the main thing about Twitter for me is the -- my wife says if she sees one more tweet from me, she's basically going to divorce me. We've only been married a year. So this is rather disturbing. And you said in an article in "Harper's Bazaar," it is the digital era is affecting romance.

KUTCHER: Yes.

MORGAN: What do you two do? Tweet each other over dinner?

(CROSSTALK)

KUTCHER: I've cut back.

MOORE: No, we actually put -- we have a rule.

MORGAN: What are the rules?

MOORE: The rules -- the phone goes down at dinner.

KUTCHER: The phone goes down at dinner. But we -- I actually read an article that there is a -- there is actually a chemical, I think it's like a dopamine release in your body when you get a response in the same way as like in a social -- in any social engagement that you're promoting a response and you get it, there is actually dopamine released in your body. And they say that when you get a reply to something that you put out or re-tweet there is an actual chemical --

MOORE: There is an ego stroke.

KUTCHER: Yes.

MOORE: It's like the bottom line.

KUTCHER: I think at all social networks, be it Facebook or Twitter or whatever it is, there's an ecosystem that exist there. But there's also an ego system that exists there. And you can sort of see by the personalities that flash at the top where the ego --

(CROSSTALK)

MORGAN: I love the fact --

KUTCHER: I have to move my hand on.

MORGAN: It's also sort of undemocratic in many ways -- KUTCHER: Tell people in Egypt it's not democracy. Tell the people in Libya that it's not democracy. Where they're sitting behind a government-run news source, right, that is projecting the same images, the same statement over and over and over again, and finally they get their true -- real voice to be heard.

I mean in oppressive societies, this kind of -- this kind of social media, this kind of democratization of media, is crumbling infrastructures that have existed for decades. And so to not -- to say that it's not democracy at its truest, I think it's -- I think it's wrong. I think that's absolutely wrong.

MORGAN: But isn't it slightly perverse?

KUTCHER: It is slightly perverse. You know there are issues like malaria that -- you know, that don't really get add dollars thrown at it --

MORGAN: What we've come now --

(CROSSTALK)

KUTCHER: Or human trafficking that doesn't really --

(CROSSTALK)

KUTCHER: And you can highlight those issues.

MORGAN: Yes. I want to make --

KUTCHER: To a massive community.

MORGAN: Let's take a short break. Because I want to come back now with the reason you're here, which is actually entirely linked to Twitter in many ways and social networking, which is human trafficking and how we can all collectively deal with this growing menace.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KUTCHER: So January, we visited the United States-Mexico border, with the United States State Department where we met a girl who told us about how she was trafficked into the United States, how she was taken into a field by her pimp and raped by 30 men on a trash bag.

That's the day that we established our foundation, the DNA Foundation, which stands for fundamental right to freedom for every person because it's within our DNA.

(END OF VIDEO CLIP)

MORGAN: And that's a very powerful statement. You could tell the emotion in your voice. But you know it was hardly surprising, given what you were talking about. This has now become a pretty full-on campaign for you guys. Tell me more about what triggered this for you.

MOORE: Well, we had been talking about the fact that we supported various causes and all of them -- you know had real value but that we really hadn't found something that we connected to, that we felt we could really get behind and we were actually sitting at home one night and we saw this program that was a documentary highlighting the issue of slavery in Cambodia.

And the thing that really just was devastating is seeing these 5, 6, 7-year-olds who were being repeatedly raped for profit and it just seemed impossible to live in a world where that was going on and not do something about it.

MORGAN: How big of a factor was it that you've got three young girls yourself and you could look at them and perhaps see them transplanted into this hideous world?

KUTCHER: Well, the average age of entry into the sex trade is 13 years old, and that's globally. By the way. Like most people sort of see this and they go, OK, that's a problem in Cambodia or that's a problem --

MOORE: Or India or Nepal.

KUTCHER: In India. And it's happening in the United States. It's between 100 and 300,000 child sex slaves in the United States today. And so when we go home, we sit around the dinner table with our girls, we're thinking, you know, 13, 14, you know, 10, 11, 12-year-old girls.

If you don't do something to stop that, that's when there is something wrong with you, in my opinion.

MORGAN: The campaign, obviously, has been gathering a little momentum and you launched it big time this week with a big series of videos involving lots of famous people. It wasn't the easiest sell reading some of your comments about this. A lot of people, famous friends of yours, didn't want to get involved.

Why was that, do you think?

KUTCHER: Well, I think that there's -- I think that there's a subsect of what we're looking at it and it's sort of dangerously bleeds over into something that people are very accustomed to. You know --

MORGAN: Prostitution?

KUTCHER: Right. So what we're focusing on is child sex slavery. Right? And when the line bleeds into prostitution, people have a little bit of trepidation because they say to themselves, what, if you're 18 years old, 19 years old, 20 years old, and you decide that this is what you want to do with your life, you should be able to choose that.

And none of us are sitting here saying that that's not -- that we don't respect someone's right to choose that. But at the same time, when you look at it and you say, all right, if the average age of entry is 13, what 13-year-old girl is choosing this as their profession and does a 13-year-old really have that choice? And so maybe they were --

MOORE: And even those who have become of age have probably been there since they were a minor and really have now either been stigmatized or don't feel that they have any other options. And we've come across that a lot with those survivors that we've spoken to.

KUTCHER: And it's also --

(CROSSTALK)

MORGAN: I want to play a little a little clip, Ashton, before we go on. It's from "The Real Men Don't Buy Girls" campaign. Let's just watch this and come back after this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Real men know how to use an iron. Real men know how to use the remote. Real men know how to make a meal. Real men prefer a close shave. Real men don't buy girls.

LONGORIA: Piers Morgan is a real man. Are you?

(END OF VIDEO CLIP)

MORGAN: Already my favorite commercial.

KUTCHER: Yes.

(LAUGHTER)

MORGAN: For all good reasons. But the point --

MOORE: And thank you, by the way, for standing up to be a real man.

KUTCHER: We appreciate it.

MORGAN: Well, no, listen, the pleasure was all mine, obviously. I think Eva Longoria gave me that endorsement there.

The key point of that is anybody could put themselves into that picture frame.

MOORE: Exactly.

MORGAN: And the celebrities like Eva who contributed to this have recorded hundreds of pretty mainstream names -- male names, and it's a very smart idea.

What I would say to you is, there's a kind of conundrum here, isn't it? On the one hand you're going to be using social media very aggressively to spread the word about this campaign.

On the other hand, you will both know that one of the reasons why some of these predators can now prey in a perhaps easy way they could resort is social media.

KUTCHER: Yes.

MORGAN: The grooming process can be done on Facebook when they were looking. What do you think about that conundrum?

KUTCHER: That's why we're using social media for this campaign, is to actually go right into the heart of where it's taking place. Seventy- six percent of the transactions for child sex slave is actually happening online.

And so if we can motivate people while they're online to do something about that, then we can make a dent. So once -- if people go to Facebook.com/DNAFoundation, they can put themselves in a video, share that video with their friends and then our hope is that next they'll go to the action tab.

And inside our action tab, we lay out some specifically defined initiatives that people can do online to flag this. We want -- we want the social web to become the police for human trafficking online and they can do it. You can go to Craigslist and you can flag the pages that look like it's child trafficking. You can go to Backpage and you can flag those things.

And people can start to actually unroot this at its root.

MORGAN: We're going to take a break and then when we come back we're going to hear from a victim of sex trafficking, a 17-year-old girl. We're going to call her Nicole. And it's pretty powerful stuff.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I started when I was 11 years old. I used to make probably like $1500 a night because I was young. And I rocked the real petite body and I had the looks that the child abusers was looking for. I'm not going to label them johns.

(END OF VIDEO CLIP)

MORGAN: That was one of the many faces of human sexual trafficking. And joining us someone else with a first-hand account of the horrors of sex trafficking. We're concealing her identity. I'll call her Nicole for the purposes of this interview. She's 17 years old and an American citizen. She's joining us at an undisclosed location.

She wants to share her stories surviving sexual trafficking when she was an underage girl.

Nicole, thank you very much for having the courage to do this interview.

NICOLE, SURVIVOR OF SEX TRAFFICKING: You're welcome.

MORGAN: Tell me what your childhood was like. NICOLE: Well, when I was 13 years old, my dad had went to jail and then my mom was really bad on drugs, and I started running away and talking to people on the Internet which led me to my pimp. And I was trying to find a way to escape my problems at my house.

MORGAN: And so was he deceitful in the kind of person that he described himself as?

NICOLE: He lied to me about his age. He put himself out there that he was a good person.

MORGAN: And that is a very familiar tactic, isn't it, of these pimps is that to start with they are incredibly nice and generous. And they seem like the perfect guys.

MOORE: It was a certain courting, actually. Almost.

(CROSSTALK)

MORGAN: Yes. Demi, let me bring you in there. I mean is this a familiar story of how these things start?

MOORE: No, what she's describing is -- I mean the stories do start to take on a very similar kind of framework with the pimp. Courting, taking them shopping, and then once they seem to be comfortable and trusting, then it flips.

MORGAN: And, Nicole, when you were under the control of this man, how bad was your life then? And what did he put you through?

NICOLE: Well, at first he told me, you know, I'll take you shopping and I will give you anything that you want and I'll take you out of the life that you're in. And he told me that everything would be fine and he would just provide for me everything that I wanted and needed.

And then about maybe the third day he started, you know, hitting me and started -- I don't know, trying to take control over me and over my life, and then he refused to let me go home.

And when I had found out that I was pregnant, he told me -- and I asked him, could I go home that day, and he told me, no, I couldn't. And then that's when I started getting really emotional about it, and I was scared.

And he said that, if you don't go home, I'll still provide for you and I'll still help you and everything will be OK. And you won't have to go back to the situation that you was in. And I told him, no, I still wanted to go home. And he had beat me that day. And I lost the baby. And then he had locked me up in the bathroom and told me I couldn't leave.

And then about the fourth day I had found a way out of the bathroom when he was gone. I went to the window and I went home.

MORGAN: When you were in the clutches of this man, was it just him that was abusing you or was he selling you on to other men? What was going on?

NICOLE: At first it was just him, and then when I had escaped to get home, I had to call somebody. And he come and pick me up and then we went to this hotel room, and then I had sex with three other men and then that's how I got home. They had to take me home and I had to have sex with them for them to take me home.

MORGAN: And how old were you then?

NICOLE: I was around 14, 15.

MORGAN: I mean, Ashton, I can see you getting emotional. Desisting to this. This is obviously one of the many stories you've had to listen to. It still moves you like --

KUTCHER: No, it's the same story. They're often different variables but it's the same story. You know, you go, OK, the guy, the trafficker, the slave owner, that's doing this, that's picking this girl, this guy we can all just sort of go, that's not -- that's not a good person, right?

But where the ambiguity comes in, is the guy that's buying this girl. Because some guy -- for that guy to want to sell that girl and continue to sell that girl, he had to be making money and so some guy went and bought that girl. And you know, maybe she showed up or maybe she was there, she looked a little young. But he didn't bother to ask. He didn't bother to help. He didn't bother--

MOORE: Or even if they ask, they don't -- they go OK.

KUTCHER: Anyone of those guys could have stopped it. And who's the guy going out to do that? You know who that guy is? On average, he's 30 years old. He's married. He has no criminal record, because there's an assumption in society -- there's a cultural conditioning that takes place -- and it happens in locker rooms and all -- places all around the -- guys going, it's not that big a deal. You know, it's just whatever.

And that's what has got to stop. Those are the guys that have to stand up and say, no real men don't go buy girls.

MORGAN: Finally, what would you say to other girls who find themselves in the same kind of situation?

NICOLE: I would tell them to go to an adult that is trustworthy, and that would listen to them, and that they're worthwhile waiting on, and they have a lot of people that do care about them, and that is there for them.

And I just want to tell them that it's not worth it. And they will be OK at the end of the day if they just try to get help.. and I just want them to know tat I'm praying for them.

(CROSS TALK)

MOORE: No, I was going to say, one of the things I'm hearing and I think about, you know, why do we even have our young girls in this position in the first place? And part of why we wanted to focus on the demand side is, you know, the risk is very low for the buyers and the sellers.

What we have is 80 percent of the girls are criminalized. We have only four states that have a safe harbor act, which basically identifies an underage girl as a victim of rape. Otherwise, they're criminalized as a prostitute and put through the criminal justice system.

And it's never addressed that they are being controlled, that they are being repeatedly raped for profit, profit that they never see. And I think that we have a lot of work to do. And a big part of that is re- identifying what the face of a slave is today. And it's our children.

MORGAN: It was interesting talking to Nicole there in the sense that there are many forms that this abuse takes. You know, this a multi- faceted form of abuse, isn't it?

KUTCHER: And then the abuse continues. And if there's one thing that I can say to Nicole, it's that I won't judge you for what somebody else did to you. Because when these girls are -- there are people out there trying to help these girls. And when they get out of this, there is this fear of judgment.

Because we as a society almost demean those women. We say that they're whores and they're sluts and so on and so forth. And we put them as a different class of human being. And if we can start to recognize them as victims -- as survivors of --

MOORE: Of a heinous crime.

KUTCHER: I think that will also change these girls' willingness to leave.

MOORE: Sometimes also lack of opportunity on the other side.

KUTCHER: Yes, a fear that they're going to be judged. At least that guy doesn't judge me for what I've done.

MORGAN: Nicole, thank you very much for finding the courage to talk to us. I really appreciate it.

NICOLE: You're welcome.

KUTCHER: Thank you, Nicole.

MOORE: Thank you, Nicole.

NICOLE: You're welcome.

MORGAN: When we come back after the break, we're going to talk about the culprits behind this, the men that you are really targeting, I think, in this campaign, which is the guys who are doing the paying of these girls.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MORGAN: That was video shot in a place called Batrack (ph), in Washington, D.C. Sexual slavery is rampant there, just four blocks from the White House.

Joining us now is Brad Myles from the Polaris Project, one of the leading nonprofiting combating human trafficking charities and modern day slavery in the United States.

Brad Myles, what is a sex trafficker.

BRAD MYLES, POLARIS PROJECT: You saw this. I mean, you saw that a trafficker really is a pimp. And in many ways -- you have pimps are pimping children. Those are sex traffickers. And you have pimps who are pimping adult women, who are using the violence and the force. Those are sex traffickers, too.

The traffickers, they're Asian. They're Latino. They're Eastern European. They're families. They're gangs. They're U.S. citizens. They're all over the map. What they're really doing is profiting off the sale of these women and girls.

MORGAN: We talked to a young girl called Nicole earlier who had been lured on this Internet by this character.

MYLES: All across the country we're hearing about these stories. There's a national hotline for the country that Polaris operates. And we're hearing these calls every day about the common tactics that the trafficker use, the luring, the grooming, the compliments.

And then the bait and switch, and the violence starts, and then the abuse, and the torture, and then the quotas.

And we just hear -- you heard Ashton say earlier, it's the same story. When we're sitting here on the national hotline and we're hearing hundreds of calls from every state across the country, it's the same story. So we need to wrap our brains around this. We need to say, this is happening and we're going to do something about it.

And it's just awful that this is happening. And it's so similar across the country.

MOORE: Not only is it similar across the country -- and we'll get into it later -- but it's exactly identical -- slightly different cultural dynamics. But I was just in Nepal and it's exactly the same, basically the same average age of entry, the same, you know, target that they're going after, and some of the same tactics.

MORGAN: Brad, let me bring you in again. One of the key problems here is a lot of girls get taken out of their country and they get quickly shipped to Eastern Europe or Asia or wherever it may be, where they are removed completely from any friends or family. How do those girls without the help of organizations like yourselves ever get out of that cycle?

MYLES: Yeah. I mean, I think that's a really common question of how do they get trapped and what are all of the things that keep them there? And you mentioned it right there. There's the violence. There's the isolation. There's -- you don't know what help is out there. You don't have a social support network around you.

You don't know that there are organizations out there like Polaris or Gems or others. You don't know there's a national hotline.

Then, like Ashton was talking about earlier, there is the fear of being judged and traffickers play on the shame and the guilt. All that combines together into a really powerful cocktail that really controls these women and girls.

And I think that the traffickers perceive that there is high profit at that low risk. And what we need to do is we need to combat those profits and we need to increase the risk. So when Ashton is talking about making the social media the police of the Internet, what that's doing is increasing for the traffickers and for the Johns. That's right what we need to be doing.

MORGAN: Brad Myles, thank you very much indeed.

Coming after the break, exactly how much money is being made in sex slavery? We'll find out.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(NEWS BREAK)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I was arrested at least 50 times. My pimp was never arrested the entire time that I was forced to work for him. You had to be aware of everything that was going on or you would die.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MORGAN: That was another survivor of sex slavery. And she makes a good point. The girls are arrested time after time, while their pimps often get away Scott free. Joining me now is Siddarth Kara, author of "Sex Trafficking, Inside the Business of Modern Slavery." Still with us, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher.

Siddarth Kara, tell me what your findings have been about modern sex slavery.

SIDDARTH KARA, AUTHOR, "SEX TRAFFICKING": I would say that there is, at a minimum, based on my data sampling around the world -- and by that I mean going to brothels, massage parlors, apartments and clubs where these children are being sold for sex. At a minimum, 1.5 2 million trafficked sex slaves in the world today, generating profits in 2010 that exceeded 39 billion dollars.

MORGAN: That's a staggering sum of money. KARA: Well -- and if you work it out on a per slave basis, OK, the global weighted average is around 29,000 dollars in profit per slave per year. Now, the acquisition cost of the average traffic sex slave is under 2,000 dollars.

So right there the return on investment is staggering. And that's what drives interest for criminals and organized crime groups to get involved in the wanton sexual exploitation of women and children.

MORGAN: How much money is the U.S. government spending on, say, policing drugs compared to sex slavery?

KARA: Great question, Piers. In general, the U.S. government spends around 300 to 350 times more money combating drug trafficking than it does human trafficking. And that's a sad statement of our moral priorities.

MORGAN: People watching this may be wondering, OK, we see the problem, we see the scale of it. How should the law be changed now? If you were in charge of policy in this area, what is the key thing that should be done?

MOORE: Well, first, look, the reason why we've initiated this campaign is we have to create awareness. You have to acknowledge a problem exists before you can actually go about finding a solution. And what we've found is that most people aren't even aware of what is going on.

And I think it hasn't been a high priority because it really hasn't been pushed forward. I think that we have a few small things. One, I think we need to spend a little bit more money training our law enforcement. Because if their mandate is to clean up prostitution, then what they are doing is going out and arresting prostitutes.

But we're just constantly then addressing the effect. And I think we need to get to the cause. And the cause is the demand. That's the buyers and the sellers. And one of the things I mentioned earlier is the Safe Harbor Act, which is a simple law that we have only four states officially that have adopted this, which is identifying an underage girl as a victim of rape.

And I think we have only four -- there's like four or five states that still don't even consider human trafficking a felony. So I think we have some --

KUTCHER: There is also age mistake defense laws, where a guy can go into a courtroom and say, oh, I didn't know she was of that age.

I think when you're buying a human being, the age mistake defense law is sort of -- kind of doesn't make a whole lot of sense anymore. And I think that we can address that as well. There's legislation state by state that can improve it.

But I think back to what Demi said, the thing that's going to improve it the most is people not buying. MORGAN: What I like about the campaign is it's got humor. It's got big celebrity power. It's going to get to the kind of demographic that I guess we're talking about here. And it seems to me the real problem from all that we've been discussing is that a lot of these guys just aren't aware of the crime they're committing.

As you said, they think the women are up for it, when actually they're not.

MOORE: They know how to act.

MORGAN: They're being tortured and maimed and threatened with death.

MOORE: I'll give you a perfect example. I met a girl who is now 18. She was 11 years old. She was taken in by a pimp in the same way described by Nicole. He took her to McDonald's. He took her to the mall.

She clearly was a little lost and looking for a place of belonging. Then once comfortable, within a few days, she was given a quota, As brad was mentioning, and that was 1,500 dollars a night. If she didn't make that quota, she was put into a tub of ice or beaten with whatever was handy.

Her pimp was referred to as Daddy Daycare, because he had all of the really young girls. And he loaded them in a car, drove them to Vegas. There wasn't enough room in the car, so he put two of them, including her, into a trunk. Arrived, posted them all on Craigslist and then went to work.

Now, it's a vicious cycle, but he clearly doesn't feel that there was enormous risk in his endeavor. And I don't think today is caught.

MORGAN: Shocking stuff. When we come back, I want to wrap up the debate here and also find out what you two are going to be up to going forward outside of this, even though I know it's taking --

(CROSS TALK)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MORGAN: It's been a fascinating hour. I mean, gruesome in many ways, but I hope we will raise the awareness that you're after to try and get people to understand what this is really all about. You said that you're both committed to the cause, whether it's 30 days or 30 years. Do you mean that? I mean, could you be in this for 30 years?

KUTCHER: Probably longer,

MOORE: I think that this isn't an issue you can step into and expect to have a big win quickly. It's too complex. And some of the best advice we got in the very beginning when we were exploring this was be prepared to be in it for the long haul.

MORGAN: How do you find the Washington sharks compared to the Hollywood sharks. When you've been lobbying politicians, are they easier to deal with than the Hollywood moguls you've had to wrestle with before?

MOORE: You know what I would say? Not just exclusive to Washington, but I think from when we started getting involved in this issue, which is now almost three years ago, where it was very difficult to even get the conversations going, not very popular, to really the last six months to a year where I think that the general awareness is starting to rise.

And I think the urgency is starting to be felt. And so I think the one thing about this issue is I don't think that there's anybody who disagrees that it's unacceptable. I think it's totally bipartisan. And it's just a matter of really forcing the hand to make it a priority and getting law enforcement to be given the directive to go after what's the cause, which is the traffickers and the Johns.

I mean, to get a slap on the wrist and maybe a 200 dollar fine and John School -- speaking of drugs, drugs come with a harsher punishment, buying drugs than buying a human being.

MORGAN: Obviously you've worked very successfully on this together, and passionately. And you've worked hard on the marriage. We've already discussed that. And Twitter. The obvious gap in all this, in these joint ventures, is what you're supposed to be, you two, which is movie stars.

MOORE: We're trying to fit that in a little bit.

MORGAN: When are we remaking "Indecent Proposal?"

(CROSS TALK)

KUTCHER: I'm not playing Woody.

(CROSS TALK)

MORGAN: What are you up to now movie-wise?

KUTCHER: I just finished a movie called "New Year's Eve." And now I'm finishing this campaign. And I'm going to go hunt for work.

MOORE: And I have "LOL" that I did with Miley Cyrus and another film, "Margin Call." That's about the crash, the financial crisis. And what was the other one? "Another Happy Day" with Ellen Barkin and Ellen Burstyn.

(CROSS TALK)

MORGAN: You sounded so passionate and focused about the issues that you're absorbed with. Has that taken over in priorities for both of you?

MOORE: Yes, I --

KUTCHER: It depends. You know, the thing about it is when you're done with the movie, you're done with the movie. I don't think that we're ever going to be done with this issue. So this one sits with you every single day. It's like our fourth kid right now.

MOORE: I think we want to make a difference with this. We don't want to just come and talk about it. We want to actually see it change. And that isn't going to come by us just jumping in and doing a little bit and coming and talking.

It really does require that depth of commitment.

KUTCHER: It's about doing the other people that have been working on this issue for so long justice.

MORGAN: I think you're going a great job. And I hope it's a very successful campaign. It deserves to be. It's well thought out. And I think it will resonate with people.

MOORE: Thank you so much.

MORGAN: Thank you.

MOORE: You do all the talking.

MORGAN: That is all for tonight. I'll leave these two squabbling. If you're home wondering what you can do to help,. we'll have all the information you need on our webpage. Here's my colleague, Anderson Cooper, with "AC 360."