View gallery
Sharpay Evans would never be excluded from a clique, but Ashley Tisdale claims she was. In an essay titled, “Breaking Up With My Toxic Mom Group. I Thought I Found My Village. Instead, I was in High School,” the 40-year-old Disney Channel alum wrote about her experience with an anonymous group of women, whom internet users speculated included famous pals Hilary Duff, Mandy Moore and Meghan Trainor.
The women used to hang out on a few occasions, as seen in pictures from the past, and Ashley no longer follows Hilary or Mandy; ergo, social media sleuths tried to dig deeper into the narrative. So, what has Ashley said about the uproar from her essay?
Here’s what we know about the “mom group” that Ashley was a part of.
What Did Ashley Tisdale Write About the ‘Toxic Mom Group’?
In the essay published through The Cut, Ashley described the “ugly” group’s “mean girl behavior” and her feelings of exclusion that left her “hurt, drained and left out.”
“I realized that there were group text chains that didn’t include everyone, which led to cliques forming within the larger group,” the former Suite Life of Zack & Cody star wrote. “And after the third or fourth time of seeing social media photos of everyone else at a hangout that I didn’t get invited to, it felt like I wasn’t really part of the group after all.”
Ashley then recalled “sitting alone one night after getting [her] daughter to bed … feeling totally lost as to what [she] was doing ‘wrong’ to be left out” of her frenemy-filled group. While she “never considered the moms to be bad people [except for] maybe one [of them],” she cut ties with them after the “dynamic stopped being healthy and positive.”
“This is too high school for me, and I don’t want to take part in it anymore,” Ashley concluded.
Who Is in the ‘Toxic Mom Group’?
Ashley never states any names in her “toxic mom group” essay, though internet users speculated that it included Hilary, Mandy, Meghan and more women who have been seen in past photos.
A rep for Ashley denied that The Cut essay was ever about Mandy, Hilary or Meghan. As noted by TMZ, the rep insisted there was “zero truth to what online ‘detectives’ think they’ve cracked.” The outlet further noted that the rep said Ashley pulled “from her own experience of being shut out of social hangs,” which unveils a “very real issue in mom circles.”
However, Hilary’s husband, Matthew Koma, may have fueled the fire when he outwardly mocked Ashley’s essay headline. Via his Instagram Stories, Matthew edited a picture of himself onto where Ashley was, and he rewrote the headline to read, “When You’re The Most Self Obsessed Tone Deaf Person On Earth, Other Moms Tend To Shift Focus To Their Actual Toddlers. A Mom Group Tell All Through A Father’s Eyes.” He wrote across the Story, “Read my interview with @TheCut.”
