The Tragic Way Demi Moore Discovered Ex-Husband Ashton Kutcher Was Having An Affair

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While Hollywood is certainly no stranger to alarming age-gap relationships, the romance between Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher still caught many off guard — including the celebrity couple themselves. After all, when they started dating in 2003, Kutcher was 25 years old, while Moore was 40 and just three years removed from Moore's wildly-expensive divorce from Bruce Willis. They ended up tying the knot in 2005, but the marriage didn't last. The two ultimately went their separate ways in 2011, with their divorce finalized two years later. Sadly, it was an affair on Kutcher's part that spelled the end for them.

And, according to the "Substance" star, she found out about it in one of the worst ways imaginable. During an interview with Diane Sawyer, on "Good Morning America," in 2019, to promote her memoir "Inside Out," Moore recalled that she learned of Kutcher's affair through, of all things, a Google alert related to a story about her then-husband's alleged mistress. From there, the Oscar nominee confronted Kutcher directly. "I asked if it was true," Moore recalled. "And he admitted it right away. And I think my response was, 'Are you f***ing kidding me?' That was it. And I think I felt like I could barely take a breath." 

Network ABC reached out to the "Punk'd" host for comment at the time, but he declined. The Google notification Moore received was for a 2011 Us Weekly interview with a woman named Sara Leal, who dished on a rather scandalous encounter she'd had with Kutcher on the day of the celebrity couple's sixth wedding anniversary (yikes). As Leal tells it, the "Just Married" star maintained that he and Moore were separated. In her aforementioned memoir, the actor herself noted that she had no reason not to take Leal at her word.

Despite the confession he reportedly made to Demi Moore in private, Ashton Kutcher hasn't publicly addressed his 2011 cheating scandal, and tends to avoid discussing his ex-wife in general. As a source close to the actor's second and current wife, Mila Kunis, told People in 2019, "Ashton has never spoken about [Moore]. He hasn't talked about her since the divorce, and he never will. He respects that she's a mother with a family." The insider also remarked that while Kutcher wasn't exactly thrilled about the "Striptease" star's tell-all memoir, it contained no information that Kunis wasn't already privy to.

That being said, the actor did eventually discuss his split from Moore in a 2023 interview with Esquire, albeit in somewhat vague terms. "Nothing makes you feel like a failure like divorce," he admitted. "Divorce feels like a wholesale f***ing failure. You failed at marriage." Again, without getting too deep into specifics, Kutcher — now older than Moore was when they started dating — also broadly disavowed how he conducted himself in his younger years. "I was an a**hole," he acknowledged succinctly.

But it also became apparent that People's 2019 source may have been underselling things a bit when they confirmed that Kutcher wasn't thrilled about Moore's book and the renewed attention it brought to their divorce. "I was f***ing p***ed," he confessed to Esquire. "I'd finally gotten to a place where the press had really laid off me and Mila, and my life and my family. And then the next day, [the paparazzi] are at my kids' school." The "That '70s Show" star seemingly got over it, though, even going on to publicly praise Moore's recent work during an early-2026 interview with Entertainment Tonight.