‘TOTALLY FALSE’

Ben Stiller Shuts Down ‘Lies’ About USAID Funding Celeb Trip

The actor and director traveled to Ukraine in 2022—but pushed back hard on claims that the agency Trump and Musk are trying to shutter paid him and other celebrities millions.

Ben Stiller is shutting down a “false” story that the government agency USAID, which Donald Trump and Elon Musk have made it their mission to dismantle this week, “funded” his and other celebrities’ trips to Ukraine.

“Totally false,” Stiller posted to X on Wednesday. “These are lies coming from Russian media,” Stiller continued, in response to an account circulating a “news” video that cites an E! News story that doesn’t appear to ever have existed on the site, according to X’s community notes on the post.

The supposed E! News story’s headline claims USAID funded Ukraine trips for Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn, Orlando Bloom, and Belgian actor Jean-Claude Van Damme—whose name the fake article misspells. The circulated video claims each were paid between $4 million and $20 million to visit the country. MAGA-supporting X users—including former Trump attorney Sidney Powell—shared the video widely, recirculating the claim that the celebs were paid to visit Ukraine to “increase [Volodymyr] Zelensky’s popularity around the world.”

Stiller shut down the video’s claims on X. “I completely self-funded my humanitarian trip to Ukraine,” he wrote. “There was no funding from USAID and certainly no personal payments.”

In June of 2022, Stiller traveled to Ukraine to meet with President Zelensky on World Refugee Day in his capacity as an ambassador for the United Nations refugee agency. Calling Zelensky, himself a former comedy actor, his “hero,” Stiller said in their meeting, “What you’ve done and the way that you’ve rallied the country and for the world, it’s really inspiring.”

But he is insisting that he did not receive any money for the trip. In another post on Wednesday, Stiller repeated, “These are lies coming from Russian media. There was no funding from USAID and certainly no payment of any kind.”

That tweet caught the attention of RT, Russia’s state-controlled news network—which had also “debunked” the fake article’s video.

“Why add to fake news by spreading more fake news, Ben?” the account replied to Stiller on X, “We are ‘Russian media’ and we are DEBUNKING this.” The account then continued, “USAID needs to be shut down for LEGIT reasons.”

Another community note on X suggests that the original source of the fake video was tsargrad.tv a Russian “propaganda channel,” which, “in context of the war in Ukraine, should be considered unreliable.”

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was established by President John F. Kennedy during the Cold War to curb Soviet influence abroad. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the agency remained in place, continuing to offer international aid—to circumvent the influence of Russia and China.

This week, the agency became a target of Trump’s White House right-hand Musk as he attempts to make massive cuts to government funding.

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Eboni Boykin-PattersonEntertainment Reporter

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