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Ashley Tisdale French wants to set the record straight.
A representative for French, 40, has addressed internet-fueled chatter that Mandy Moore, Hilary Duff and Meghan Trainor were part of the “toxic mom group” that she wrote about in The Cut last week.
According to TMZ, French’s rep denied the rumors in a Monday, January 5, statement, clarifying that French was not referring to Moore, 41, Duff, 38, or Trainor, 32. The rep added that French had intended her Thursday, January 1 piece, titled “Breaking Up With My Toxic Mom Group,” as a way to spotlight an issue that other women can relate to, of being shut out of a friend group.
Us Weekly has reached out to the actress for comment.
“There’s one recent topic that has made my phone blow up like no other since I first wrote about it a few weeks ago. It’s a subject that has made women DM me to say ‘I feel seen’ and to share their most emotional stories with me,” French wrote in her essay for 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). The topic? Mom-group drama.”
French shares daughters Jupiter, 4, and Emerson, 15 months, with husband Christopher French. After welcoming their firstborn in 2021, she formed a bond with a group of friends who were also pregnant during the coronavirus pandemic.
However, she eventually began to feel disconnected from that mom circle, writing, “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. I was starting to feel frozen out of the group, noticing every way that they seemed to exclude me.”
She continued, “I told myself it was all in my head, and it wasn’t a big deal. And yet, I could sense a growing distance between me and the other members of the group, who seemed to not even care that I wasn’t around much.”
At one point, she texted the group that “this is too high school for me, and I don’t want to take part in it anymore.”
French’s honesty “didn’t exactly go over well,” she recalled. “Some of the others tried to smooth things over. One sent flowers, then ignored me when I thanked her for them.”
She added: “To be clear, I have never considered the moms to be bad people. (Maybe one.) But I do think our group dynamic stopped being healthy and positive — for me, anyway.”
French did not name names in her essay, and said she still doesn’t understand why she was excluded from social events.
“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.”
