Hilary Duff Calls Ashley French’s Toxic-Mom Essay ‘Not True’

Hilary Duff went on Call Her Daddy and called b.s. on the viral essay that Ashley French (née Tisdale) wrote for The Cut last month. Although “Breaking Up With My Toxic Mom Group” — in which French alludes to being excluded from social gatherings and text threads — doesn’t mention anyone by name, it was widely speculated to be about a group that included Duff, Mandy Moore, and Meghan Trainor. Duff said she doesn’t think people had to “connect very many dots” to reach this conclusion, though she noted that she has multiple mom-friend groups because she has four kids. “I was pretty taken aback and felt just sad,” Duff recalled of her initial reaction to the piece. “It sucks to read something that’s not true. And it sucks on behalf of, like, six women and all of their lives.” Pointing to the timing of the piece, she said that she felt “used”; when host Alex Cooper followed up by questioning whether this would have happened if it weren’t for Duff’s resurgence in pop culture, Duff raised a finger and smiled.

Her husband previously had a much more blunt response. On January 6, Matthew Koma posted a Photoshopped Cut cover of himself with the headline, “When You’re The Most Self Obsessed Tone Deaf Person On Earth, Other Moms Tend To Shift Their Focus To Their Actual Toddlers.” Duff told Cooper that she didn’t know Koma was going to chime in and stir the pot but said that everything he does makes her laugh. “I was like, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God,’” she recalled. “But I also don’t censor him and I don’t tell him what he can and can’t post. He is so fierce for me, and I love him for that.” In the meantime, Duff’s friendships with Moore and Trainor seem to be going strong — she mentioned both of them by name in her Call Her Daddy episode. We don’t know if the rest of the group is still fully intact … maybe someone else skipped the French essay and just made a French exit.