Matthew Koma Claps Back at Ashley Tisdale’s ‘Toxic’ Mom Group Tale

The Moment

Somewhere in Los Angeles, a celebrity mom group text is either on fire or on mute.

Hilary Duff’s husband, musician Matthew Koma, jumped into the chat publicly this week after Ashley Tisdale wrote a viral essay calling her starry mom group “mean” and “toxic.”

Instead of issuing a calm little Notes app statement like a sensible millennial dad, Koma took to Instagram Stories with a fake New York Magazine / The Cut cover starring himself. The spoof headline? A wordy roast that basically said: when you’re the “most self-obsessed, tone deaf person on earth,” other moms will focus on their kids instead of you.

He added a sarcastic caption: “Read my new interview with @thecut.” No names, but let’s not pretend we don’t know who just wrote about a “toxic” mom group for that exact outlet.

Meanwhile, Tisdale has been detailing how she felt excluded from the group – left off hangouts, cut out of certain text chains, and ultimately so over it that she texted everyone that the whole thing was “too high school” and she was done.

So yes, the High School Musical girlie and the Lizzie McGuire girlie have graduated to the same plot line: adult clique drama, now with influencers, Grammy winners, and toddlers.

The Take

I have to say it: this whole saga feels like the high school cafeteria rebooted with diaper bags and brand deals.

On one side, you have Ashley, 40, owning her hurt, saying the group dynamic stopped being “healthy and positive,” and describing the sting of seeing everyone at events she wasn’t invited to. That is painfully relatable, celebrity or not. Most moms I know could give a TED Talk titled “That Time the Group Chat Hung Out Without Me.”

On the other side, you’ve got Matthew Koma, who clearly thinks this whole thing is less about mean girls and more about one person turning private friction into a public pity tour. His fake cover doesn’t just clap back; it calls someone “self-obsessed” and “tone deaf” – which is a pretty harsh diagnosis coming from a guy whose wife is in the group.

Here’s where I land: everyone is technically allowed to tell their story, but when you turn your mom group into content, you’re also turning every unnamed woman in it into a character. And they’re not all as famous or media-trained as Duff and Mandy Moore.

At the same time, having your spouse do the dragging for you? That’s a choice. It’s protective, sure, but it also escalates the vibes from “ouch, that hurt” to “we’re running a counter-PR campaign.” It’s the mom-group version of a friend jumping into your Facebook argument from 2011 and dropping a dissertation.

The real plot twist is how familiar this all is. Take away Ojai hotels and Grammys, and it’s just modern friendship in the age of group chats: cliques, sub-threads, screenshots, and people deciding whether to process their hurt in therapy, in a journal, or in a personal essay for a major publication.

If there’s a quiet lesson here, it might be this: not every conflict needs its own think piece, and not every think piece needs a response meme.

Receipts

Let’s separate what’s actually on record from what fans are filling in.

Confirmed:

• Ashley Tisdale wrote an essay for The Cut describing her celebrity mom group as “mean” and “toxic,” and saying she ultimately left when the dynamic stopped feeling “healthy and positive,” according to the outlet and subsequent coverage.
• In that piece and a follow-up personal blog post, she says she felt excluded from certain group text chains, saw social media photos of group hangouts she wasn’t invited to, and texted the group that it was “too high school” and she didn’t want to take part anymore, as quoted in reporting from Page Six (Jan. 7, 2026).
• Tisdale shares two daughters, Jupiter and Emerson, with her husband Christopher French, and referenced them in the context of the mom group experience.
• Matthew Koma posted a fake Cut cover on his Instagram Stories featuring himself, with a headline referring to “the most self-obsessed tone deaf person on earth” and a caption reading, “Read my new interview with @thecut,” per screenshots circulated in entertainment reporting.
• Hilary Duff, Mandy Moore, and Meghan Trainor have all been publicly identified as members of the wider LA mom friend group Tisdale wrote about, though she did not name anyone directly in the essay.

Hilary Duff’s husband eviscerates ‘self obsessed’ and ‘tone deaf’ Ashley Tisdale over toxic mom group drama https://t.co/1RAgC8mt7S pic.twitter.com/g7ewUiohim

— Page Six (@PageSix) January 7, 2026

Unverified / Reading Between the Lines:

• That Koma’s post is 100 percent, explicitly about Tisdale. He doesn’t name her, even if the timing and wording make the connection obvious for many fans.
• Exactly what happened at specific hangouts, who hosted what, and why certain invites were or weren’t extended. We only have Tisdale’s perspective on the group dynamics.
• Any private response from Duff, Moore, or other moms in the circle. So far, any “response” is limited to social media posts that people are interpreting as reaction, not formal statements.

Backstory (For Casual Readers)

If you haven’t kept up with Disney alumni since your kids aged out of the tween years, here’s the cast list.

Ashley Tisdale, best known from Disney’s “High School Musical” era, is now a 40-year-old actress, producer, and mom of two. Hilary Duff, once the face of “Lizzie McGuire,” is a longtime TV star and mom of three. Matthew Koma is Duff’s husband, a Grammy-winning songwriter and producer. Their wider mom circle reportedly includes singer Mandy Moore and pop star Meghan Trainor, among other LA moms with strollers and IMDB pages.

In her recent essay, Tisdale described joining this mom group, then slowly realizing she felt left out: cliquey sub-texts, gatherings she saw online but wasn’t invited to, and a general sense that she didn’t quite fit the cool-girl energy. She eventually told the group she was done, calling it “too high school.”

Her words went viral because they touch on something many women over 30 know too well: adult female friendships can be just as complicated as anything that happened in a locker-lined hallway – especially when careers, kids, and social media are layered on top.

What’s Next

Where does celebrity mom drama go from here?

Publicly, it may not go much further unless one of the principals decides to really speak on it. So far:

• Tisdale has already had her say in essay and blog form. If she expands, it’s most likely to be in a controlled setting – a podcast, a future book, or another personal post where she can set the tone.
• Duff and Moore have stayed publicly quiet on the specifics. If this does start to affect their reputations among fans, we might eventually see a gentle “we wish her well”-style comment or a broader conversation about friendship boundaries rather than a point-by-point rebuttal.
• Koma could double down or delete, but in his world, sarcastic posts are kind of a brand. If there’s more, expect it to be cheeky, not a formal apology tour.

The more interesting “next” might actually be offscreen. Do any of these women reconnect privately? Do they accept that some friendships are a season, not a lifetime? Or does everyone dig in, build new mom groups, and quietly vow never to put a group text in print again?

For the rest of us, this is a front-row seat to a very modern question: when your personal hurt involves other people, how much of it belongs in a published essay – and how much belongs in a hard, awkward, but private conversation?

Sources: Reporting and quotes as summarized from Page Six coverage of the incident (Jan. 7, 2026), plus Ashley Tisdale’s own descriptions of the mom group experience in her essay for The Cut and a follow-up personal blog post.

Where do you draw the line between telling your side of a friendship story and turning real people into characters for public consumption?