Hilary Duff’s husband, Matthew Koma, has seemingly called Ashley Tisdale “self-obsessed” and “tone deaf” after the High School Musical star penned an essay about leaving her celebrity mom group due to their “toxic” and “mean girl behaviour.”
While Tisdale has not named the participants in the group, she was previously in a group with Los Angeles-based moms, including Duff, Mandy Moore and Meghan Trainor.
On Tuesday (6 January), a day after Tisdale published her scathing essay about why she left the group in The Cut, 38-year-old Koma came to Duff’s defense by posting a fake magazine cover of himself, with the headline: “A mom group tell all through a father’s eyes: When You’re the Most Self-Obsessed Tone Deaf Person on Earth, Other Moms Tend to Shift Focus To Their Actual Toddlers.”
He added in a sarcastic caption: “Read my new interview with @thecut.”
The Independent has contacted representatives for Tisdale and Duff for comment.
The post comes after Tisdale, who shares two children with music composer Christopher French, wrote in her essay for The Cut that she felt as though she had “found a village” in her mom group after the birth of her first daughter, Jupiter, in 2021.
But Tisdale claimed the dynamic took a turn for the worse when she was “frozen out of the group” and “excluded” before she noticed their supposed high school-style behaviour.
She wrote: “I remember being left out of a couple of group hangs, and I knew about them because Instagram made sure it fed me every single photo and Instagram Story.”
She recalled another incident at a dinner party where she was “sat at the end of the table, far from the rest of the women.”
Tisdale said that when she confronted the group, one person sent flowers, “then ignored me when I thanked her for them.”
Moore spoke about the mom group in a 2022 interview with InStyle, saying: “And so, we had babies at the same time and [Duff], being the super-mom that she is, formed a cool mom club.”
Aside from family outings and baby music classes, Instagram posts from 2022 showed members of the mom group went on a trip to a resort together without Moore, who was about to welcome her second baby. Trainor captioned the post, “I have mom friends and I love them.”
A representative for Tisdale told TMZ Monday that her essay was not about her friendship with Moore, Duff, and Trainor, stating that Tisdale’s essay aimed to highlight issues mothers face, based on her personal experience with a different group of friends.
Tisdale has already drawn criticism for her mom group comments, with Jenna Bush Hager questioning why the actor aired the mom group dramas in such a “public” way, rather than having conversations with her friends privately.
Speaking during Tuesday’s episode of Today with Jenna & Friends, Hager said: “Feeling left out is public because of social media, but also the fact that she wrote an article and made it public, I don’t know. Good for her for telling her truth.”
“But I also think private conversations are more and more important. Speaking your truth to the people who have hurt you should be enough. I hope we can also teach that if you feel wronged, if you feel hurt, show love.”
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