Jan. 7, 2026, 8:30 a.m. ET
Matthew Koma is standing by wife Hilary Duff after Ashley Tisdale’s viral essay on her “toxic” celebrity mom group.
In a Jan. 6 Instagram story, the singer and DJ slammed Tisdale’s claims of being iced out of a mom group that reportedly included Duff.
“When You’re The Most Self-Obsessed Tone Deaf Person On Earth, Other Moms Tend To Shift Focus To Their Actual Toddlers,” Koma wrote alongside a photoshopped image of his face over Tisdale’s.
“Read my interview with @thecut,” he wrote with the photo, adding the title “A Mom Group Tell All Through a Father’s Eyes.”
The original version of the image Koma used was published alongside Tisdale’s essay in The Cut titled, “Breaking up with my toxic mom group.”
While Tisdale did not name the other members of her former friend circle, social media sleuths were quick to speculate she was referencing celebrities including Duff, Mandy Moore and Meghan Trainor.
USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Duff, Tisdale, Moore and Trainor for comment.
Tisdale shares daughters Jupiter, 4, and Emerson, 1, with husband and composer Christopher French.
Koma and Duff have three daughters together: Banks, 7, Mae, 4, and Townes, 1. Duff also shares a son, 13-year-old Luca, with ex-husband Mike Comrie.
Ashley Tisdale says she was left out of mom group: ‘I was in high school again’
In a candid essay published on New Year’s Day, Tisdale opened up about feeling excluded from her friend group of fellow new moms.
“I was just so happy to have found these incredible, smart, funny women. Now it seemed that this group had a pattern of leaving someone out. And that someone had become me,” wrote Tisdale, who used her married name for her byline.
The actress and Disney Channel alum said the group, which formed during the pandemic, initially felt like “my village.” But then she began to notice the other women seemingly hanging out without her.
“Here I was sitting alone one night after getting my daughter to bed, thinking, ‘Maybe I’m not cool enough?’,” she wrote. “All of a sudden, I was in high school again, feeling totally lost as to what I was doing ‘wrong’ to be left out.”
Eventually, Tisdale said, she broke up with the group with a text message: “This is too high school for me and I don’t want to take part in it anymore.”
Tisdale previously wrote about the experience in a post for her blog, By Ashley French, which she said prompted her phone to “blow up like no other.”
“It’s a subject that has made women [message] me to say, ‘I feel seen’ and to share their most emotional stories with me,” Tisdale said in The Cut. “It’s one that has also made wannabe online sleuths try to do some investigating like they’re on ‘CSI’ (please, don’t even try — whatever you think is true isn’t even close).”
Tisdale does not follow Duff or Moore on Instagram. The actress still follows Trainor’s account as of publication.
Contributing: Edward Segarra, USA TODAY
Melina Khan is a national trending reporter for USA TODAY. She can be reached at melina.khan@usatoday.com.
