Hilary Duff’s Husband Has Entered the Ashley Tisdale ‘Toxic’ Mom Group Chat 

Just when I was worried the Ashley Tisdale toxic mom group drama was going to die down much too quickly, Hilary Duff‘s husband, Matthew Koma, posted at the 11th hour to ensure the mess continues for at least one more news cycle. But if we’re lucky, maybe Tisdale’s husband will post something or, even better, Meghan Trainor and her husband, Daryl Sabara, will. This is the kind of low-stakes, behind-the-curtain celebrity drama that gets me up in the morning.

On January 1, The Cut published a personal essay from Tisdale, headlined, “Breaking Up With My Toxic Mom Group,” which was originally posted to her Substack in December as an advice-style blog. It has since caused quite the stir.

Koma posted an Instagram story late Tuesday, mocking Tisdale’s essay by photoshopping himself onto her photo for The Cut. He replaced their headline with, “When You’re The Most Self Obsessed Tone Deaf Person On Earth, Other Moms Tend To Shift Focus To Their Actual Toddlers.” He also added the subhead, “A Mom Group Tell All Through A Father’s Eyes,” and captioned it, “read my interview with @thecut.” Messy!

“So that’s exactly what I texted to the group after being left out from yet another group hang: ‘This is too high school for me and I don’t want to take part in it anymore,'” Tisdale writes in her essay. She concludes this specific paragraph with, “To be clear, I have never considered the moms to be bad people. (Maybe one.) But I do think our group dynamic stopped being healthy and positive — for me, anyway.”

Naturally, everyone now wants to know who the “bad” person is. The group includes Duff, Trainor, and Mandy Moore—but Tisdale’s reps told TMZ on Monday that the piece is not about any of those women, adding that it has nothing to do with a rumor that Tisdale is MAGA (she’s a registered Democrat).

However, the internet quickly noted that while Tisdale still follows Trainor on Instagram, she does not follow Moore or Duff, nor do they follow her. Even messier, Duff’s sister, Haylie Duff, liked Tisdale’s Instagram post about her essay. The sisters are rumored to be estranged and haven’t been photographed together since 2019—Hilary kind of addressed it in December in an interview with Rolling Stone about her new music, saying she and her fans have been through so many similar things, like “trying to find yourself in adulthood [or] family drama.”

In 2024, Deux Moi claimed that the sisters fell out over Koma, and that he didn’t get along with Haylie or her fiancé. While family fallouts are a bummer, Haylie is reportedly a Republican while Hilary is a Democrat—so if Koma is on the side of abortion rights, gay rights, trans rights, and immigrants’ rights in this scenario, well, I think that’s the only side to be on, personally.

And while none of the moms from this “toxic” mom group have weighed in (yet!!!), another former Disney star threw her two cents in. “It’s very simple, it’s not supposed to be dramatic, but I get it,” Kim Possible herself, Christy Carlson Romano, said in a video addressing mom groups, delivering what felt like a very polite but unmistakable drag of Tisdale. “Sometimes it gets a little crazy, and then you write an article about it.”

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