Ashley Tisdale French, Hilary Duff, Mandy Moore, and the Disney Channel Mama Drama That Ate the Internet

Ashley Tisdale French has a bone to pick with a posse of former celebrity mom friends, and she’s making it everyone’s problem.

Tisdale French, with husband Christopher French, is mom to Jupiter, 4, and Ember, 1. After bursting onto the scene as mean girl Sharpay in 2006’s High School Musical, she continued to work as an actor in projects including the franchise’s sequels and spinoffs. Sharpay underwent a redemption arc, even starring as protagonist in 2011’s Sharpay’s Fabulous Adventure, and Tisdale French underwent a transformation of her own, getting married and having children, pivoting to voice acting for the likes of Baby Shark’s Big Movie and emerging in her current form: Ashley Tisdale French, Mommy Blogger. This most recent evolution wrought first a piece on her website, titled “You’re Allowed to Leave Your Mom Group,” and then, more recently, its more alluringly headlined sibling, “Breaking Up With My Toxic Mom Group” on The Cut. Both posts cover the same territory, summed up by Tisdale French herself as “the thing nobody prepared me for: Mom groups can turn toxic.”

In the articles, Tisdale French doesn’t name names, but she does detail the feeling of being iced out, little by little, from a group of mom friends she had previously felt close to, watching them soak up each other’s awesomeness at a distance through Instagram posts of hangouts that she wasn’t invited to. Eventually, she says she excluded herself from the narrative, leaving that group chat and the moms themselves in the rearview. Even she has to admit that she knew that the essays would compel “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),” on the hunt to ID the women who Tisdale French says—gasp!—had group texts without her. Naturally, the game was afoot.

The whole thing is intriguing, no denying that—especially when you factor in the 2022 photos that those very same self-appointed PIs dug up, of Tisdale French sorority-squatting in matching white sweatsuits with “mother” down one leg and their respective kids’ names down the other, posted to Hilary Duff’s Instagram, Meghan Trainor right there in the mix, and Mandy Moore shouted out as missing and missed in the post’s caption. Duff has yapped about loving the friend group in the past, notably having someone to text and complain to about her family getting the flu, and has shared photos on Instagram Stories of the kids at Mommy and Me music classes too. (“Juju has that strong side eye,” Duff wrote on one photo of Tisdale French’s then-infant, Jupiter, looking askance at another baby.)

A rep for Tisdale French told TMZ on Monday that the piece isn’t about that friend group, nor was the actor ostracized for her politics, telling the site that Tisdale French is a registered Democrat.

But by Tuesday, there was more reason to believe this may have been the group or that Duff may have been involved, after her husband, musician Matthew Koma, posted a now-unavailable Instagram Story about Tisdale French. Koma shared the photo of Tisdale French that accompanies her Cut essay, but with his head superimposed onto her body. He appended satirical headline text of his own: “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.”

The cherry on top is a sarcastic call to action on his fake article: “Read my new interview with @thecut.” It doesn’t exactly scream “this essay isn’t about my wife and her custom ‘mother’ sweatpants.”

Tisdale French explained in her essay that she began feeling left out and uncool, echoes of her high school (not the musical kind, the learning kind) insecurities coming back to haunt her. “But I’m not in high school anymore,” she wrote. “I’m a mom.” She rationalized that she was setting an example for her kids by standing up for herself and letting her not-friends know that there would be no more mommy-n-me hangs for her, thank you very much. “Surely, it would have been easier to disappear without explanation—and that would have allowed all of us to convince ourselves that we simply ‘drifted apart’,” she wrote.

Easier, yes, and arguably better.

If you can afford to shell out for a $10.99 monthly HBO Max basic plan subscription—maybe even less if you take the time to track down a promo code, and even more affordable if you share a login—the indelible lessons of Big Little Lies are priceless. Not all friend groups share what Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Zoe Kravitz, and Laura Dern do (murder secrets, very nice views of Monterey Bay). Every friendship looks different, and has a unique ingredient list for its glue. People come and go. In her original post, Tisdale French called the group “exactly what I needed at the time.” Now, not so much. And that’s fine. Seasons pass, needs change.

Psych studies have found that having friends helps us live—friendships literally decrease risk of death—and live better, happier lives. Young women in particular tend to rely on their friends for intimacy and support, more than men of the same age, according to one survey. Friends are important, there’s no doubt about that, but so is self-awareness.

High school sucks. Mean girl stuff sucks. Unfortunately, neither high school stuff nor mean girl stuff is exclusive to the adolescent stage of life. But here’s the beautiful lesson that comes with age and experience: You can’t control what anyone else does, but you can control how you react to it. This is something that’s as true for Disney Channel alumnus Hollywood moms as it is for us regular degular ones: Not all friendships last forever, no matter how fire the group chat once was.

Duff, so far, appears to be holding true to the ol’ “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” rule, not commenting publicly as of publication.

Tisdale French doesn’t seem to be in possession of that particular throw pillow either. “It didn’t exactly go over well,” she shared of the chat’s reaction to her departure announcement to the group via text: “This is too high school for me and I don’t want to take part in it anymore.” Shocking. No wonder we haven’t seen any of the alleged subjects sharing celebratory retweets of her essay, dredging up old drama.

If it was childish behavior Tisdale French was hoping to cut out of her life, we have some bad news: This is all high school, and there isn’t even a musical to hum along to this time.

Representatives for Ashley Tisdale French and Hilary Duff did not immediately respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.