Hilary Duff Finally Breaks Silence on Ashley Tisdale’s Toxic Mom Essay: ‘It Sucks’
When Ashley Tisdale wrote an essay about drama with her mom group, people quickly began to speculate that she was writing about Hilary Duff and her friends. Duff’s husband all but confirmed this when he posted a response. Duff largely kept quiet on the matter until now. She admitted that seeing Tisdale’s piece did not feel good.
Many speculated that Ashley Tisdale wrote an essay about Hilary Duff and her friends
In an essay published in The Cut, Tisdale wrote about the distance between herself and her “toxic mom group.” While she once felt close to the other women, she began to feel that they were icing her out.
“I was starting to feel frozen out of the group, noticing every way that they seemed to exclude me,” she wrote.
She added that her dynamic with the friend group began to make her feel like she was in high school again.
“[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.”
Readers quickly inferred that Tisdale was writing about Duff, Mandy Moore, and Megan Trainor in her essay.
Hilary Duff spoke about Ashley Tisdale’s essay
While a rep for Tisdale denied that the essay was about this group of celebrity women, Duff took it as a dig at her. She admitted it stung.
“I felt really sad. I honestly felt really sad,” she said on the Call Her Daddy podcast, adding, “I was, like, pretty, pretty taken aback and felt just, like, sad.”
She didn’t feel that the essay was fair or truthful.
“So I think I just was like, ‘Woah,’” she said. “It sucks to read something that’s, like, not true. And it sucks on behalf of, like, six women in all of their lives.”
She added that the timing of the essay, which came shortly before she released an album and embarked on a tour, made her feel “used.”
Her estranged sister showed support for the essay
While Duff didn’t appreciate Tisdale’s essay, her sister showed her support. Haylie Duff liked a post about the essay on Instagram. The two women have reportedly grown close amid the drama.
This is notable, as the Duff sisters are currently estranged. Duff opened up her relationship with Haylie after writing the song “We Don’t Talk.”
“It’s definitely about my sister,” she told CBS Mornings, tearing up. “And just absolutely the most lonely part of my existence is not having my sister in my life at the moment.”
The Lizzie McGuire actor previously kept quiet about her relationship with her sister, but she said she felt moved to write about it on her latest album.
“I don’t know if she’ll hear it,” she said. “I don’t know how she’ll react to it. You know, it is a really personal part of my life that doesn’t get to stay personal. So I might as well say how it is for me, and that’s all I’m trying to do. I’m not trying to say anything bad. It’s literally just my experience — and that’s really all I feel like sharing.”
