Hilary Duff has spoken out about Ashley Tisdale’s ‘Breaking Up With My Toxic Mom Group’ essay during her recent appearance on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast.
Tisdale, 40, penned the viral essay for The Cut in January, writing about how she felt as though she had “found a village” in her mum group. However after feeling “excluded” and “frozen out”, she chose to leave, stating: “This is too high school for me, and I don’t want to take part in it anymore.”
Tisdale’s explosive essay went particularly viral because of the A-listers involved, with Hilary Duff, Mandy Moore and Meghan Trainor known to be among the women in the group.
And while the High School Musical star did not name names, the celebrities quickly became implicated in the unfolding media frenzy.
Duff, 38, chose not to respond publicly at the time. However, during her recent interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast, she officially broke her silence on the situation.
“I honestly felt really sad,” the Lizzie McGuire star recalled of her reaction to Tisdale’s open essay. “I was, like, pretty, pretty taken aback and felt just, like, sad.”
“I have my core group of friends who have been my ride or dies for 20 years, 10 to 20 years, and I have tons of different groups of mom friends because I have four kids,” she continued. “So I think I just was like, whoa, it sucks to read something that’s not true, and it sucks on behalf of six women in all of their lives.
“I think it came at the craziest time where I was like, the timing felt not great, and I felt used,” she added.
Duff also commented on her husband Matthew Koma’s response, with the singer-songwriter coming to his wife’s defence in a viral post at the time.
Recreating Tisdale’s cover of The Cut, Koma posted a shot of himself to Instagram alongside the caption: “A mom group tell all through a father’s eyes: When You’re the Most Self-Obsessed Tone Deaf Person on Earth, Other Moms Tend to Shift Focus To Their Actual Toddlers.”
“Honestly, everything he does makes me laugh. So I was like, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God,’” Duff recalled of Koma’s post. “But I also don’t censor him, and I don’t tell him what he can and can’t post. He is so, like, fierce for me, and, like, I love him for that.”
Hilary Duff’s full interview on Call Her Daddy with Alex Cooper is available to watch now.