As Elon Musk began dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development on Donald Trump’s behalf, and strongmen in Russia, Hungary and El Salvador rejoiced, actor Ben Stiller went on X to slam an evidently fake entertainment news report that says that he, Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn and celebrities received millions of taxpayer dollars to promote U.S. government support for Ukraine.
“These are lies coming from Russian media,” the “Zoolander” actor said on X in response to the video’s claim that he received $4 million from the embattled agency. “I completely self-funded my humanitarian trip to Ukraine. There was no funding from USAID and certainly no payment of any kind.”
Stiller notably didn’t travel to Ukraine in June 2022 at the behest of the U.S. government, according to ABC News. Instead he visited Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Stiller was there to mark World Refugee Day, as Russia’s February 2022 invasion forced millions of Ukrainians to flee to other countries in Europe.
In another X post, Stiller also called the video “totally false” and “untrue.” The video used a logo for E! News but appeared to be amateurishly done and lacking the entertainment site’s usually glitzy production values. The video also made the outlandish claim that Angelina Jolie received $20 million from USAID for her May 2022 visit to Lviv. But like Stiller, the “Maria” star was there at the behest of UNHCR, where she has been a special envoy for a decade.
Meanwhile, Penn visited Ukraine several times to meet Zelensky, including hours after the Russian invasion as the one-time TV personality was forced into his new role as “a wartime president,” Slate reported. But Penn had begun traveling to Ukraine before the invasion in order to make a long-planned 2023 documentary about Zelensky. The documentary, “Superpower,” was backed by several production companies, including Vice News and one co-founded by Penn.
The video claimed USAID also paid Jean-Claude Van Damme and Orlando Bloom $1.5 million and $8 million, respectively. The video also featured narration by an A.I.-sounding female voice and used curious phrasing as the voice said the payments were done “to increase Zelensky’s popularity among foreign audiences, particularly in the United States.” The involvement of celebrities “made it easier to coordinate funding programs for Ukraine during the conflict,” the video also said.
It hasn’t been determined whether Russia media in fact created and disseminated the video. But Stiller’s post came as the New York Times reported that the Kremlin and authoritarian leaders in other countries, who are notoriously intolerant of dissent, celebrated Trump dismantling an agency they’ve long seen as a threat to their power.
USAID promotes democracy, human rights and good governance in other countries by funding programs that support election monitoring groups, anti-corruption watchdogs, independent media outlets and human rights organizations — “exactly the kind of oversight that leaders like (Vladimir) Putin detest,” the New York Times reported.