There’s new ‘toxic mom group’ drama starring Ashley Tisdale and Hilary Duff’s husband
(CNN) — Beef looks a little different these days for some former teen actors from the early 2000s.
Along with the return of low rise jeans and trucker hats, the world can also now revel in what appears to be drama between two former Disney channel stars.
It all publicly started when The Cut published a personal essay from actress Ashley Tisdale last week titled “Breaking Up With My Toxic Mom Group.”
The star, known for her work on “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody” and the “High School Musical” franchise, wrote about how she and some friends had formed a group chat to talk about being new moms, after all being “pregnant through the early pandemic” and missing out “on the activities where you meet other expectant mothers.”
Through the chat and the playdates it spawned, Tisdale initially believed she had found her “village,” she wrote. At some point, she “began to wonder whether that was really true.”
“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 wrote. “Another time, at one of the mom’s dinner parties, I realized where I sat with her — which was at the end of the table, far from the rest of the women. I was starting to feel frozen out of the group, noticing every way that they seemed to exclude me.”
She recalled other times being left out and feeling distanced from the group, all of which made her wonder “Why me?”
“The truth is, I don’t know and I probably never will. What I do know is that it took me back to an unpleasant but familiar feeling I thought I’d left behind years ago,” she wrote. “Here I was sitting alone one night after getting my daughter to bed, thinking, Maybe I’m not cool enough? All of a sudden, I was in high school again, feeling totally lost as to what I was doing ‘wrong’ to be left out.”
Quicker than you could say “MomTok” (which has its own drama), internet sleuths quickly deduced by combing social media that said mom group included fellow actresses and child stars Hilary Duff and Mandy Moore as well as some other high profile women living in Los Angeles.
Then Duff’s husband, singer/songwriter Matthew Koma, metaphorically entered the chat.
On Tuesday, Koma took to Instagram stories to post a photo of himself made to look like Tisdale’s photo in her Cut essay using the outlet’s logo and a fake headline reading “When You’re The Most Self Obsessed Tone Deaf Person On Earth, Other Moms Tend To Shift Focus To Their Actual Toddlers.”
He added a subheadline that read “A Mom Group Tell All Through A Father’s Eyes” and included as a caption “Read my new interview with @TheCut.”
Duff, who starred in Disney Channel’s hit series “Lizzie McGuire” as a teen, married Koma, who is in the band Winnetka Bowling League, in 2019 and they are the parents of three young daughters.
She also shares a son with her ex-husband Mike Comrie.
Tisdale’s essay for The Cut is not her first on the subject to go viral.
In December 2025, a post on her blog headlined “You’re Allowed to Leave Your Mom Group” under her married name, Ashley French, stirred conversation on social media.
CNN has reached out to reps for Tisdale, Duff, Koma and Moore for comment.
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