Ashton Kutcher said that he was “fucking pissed” when Demi Moore, his ex-wife and extremely famous actor, published her 2019 memoir, Inside Out, in a new interview with Esquire. In her book, Moore alleged that he pressured her into threesomes and cheated on her. She also wrote that she began struggling with alcohol again during their marriage, and claimed he said to her, “I don’t know if alcoholism is a real thing.”

“I was fucking pissed,” Kutcher told the magazine, ahead of the release of his new Netflix rom-com with Reese Witherspoon, Your Place or Mine. “I’d finally gotten to a place where the press had really laid off me and Mila [Kunis], and my life and my family. And then the next day, [the paparazzi] are at my kids’ school.” 

He added, “I don’t want to open anything up in that realm.”

Kutcher has long been reticent about his thoughts on the divorce as well as Moore’s memoir. When it was published and began making headlines, he tweeted, “I was about to push the button on a really snarky tweet. Then I saw my son, daughter, and wife and I deleted it.”

The actor has attempted to protect his privacy over the years, especially when it comes to his family with Kunis. They don’t often walk red carpets together, and they never post photographs of their two children, Esquire noted. He’s successfully stayed mum when it comes to his private life, which was likely easier to do during his long break from acting; it’s been nine years since his last feature, apart from last year’s Vengeance (in that time he was dealing with a devastating autoimmune disorder and managing a successful career in venture capital). So one can see how he’d focus less on what was said, and more so the frenzy it generated.

This interview is the first that he’s really shared much about his experience with Moore, like how he become a parent to her three daughters, Tallulah, Rumer, and Scout. “I was 26, bearing the responsibility of an eight-year-old, a 10-year-old, and a 12-year-old,” he said. “That’s how some teen parents must experience their 20s.”

Asked about Moore’s miscarriage and IVF treatment, which she also included in the memoir, he said, “I love kids. I wouldn’t have gotten married to a woman that had three kids if I didn’t love kids. The idea of having another kid would have been incredible. For whatever reason, I had to have that experience.”

“Nothing makes you feel like a failure like divorce,” Kutcher said of their 2011 separation. “Divorce feels like a wholesale fucking failure. You failed at marriage.”

While it was “humiliating and embarrassing,” he said he had no choice but to face reality. “You own the shit you did wrong, and you go forward.”