Ashley Tisdale urges fans to 'find strength' amid mom group drama

Bang Showbiz on Jan 10, 2026

Published in Women

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Ashley Tisdale has urged her followers to "find strength within" amid her "toxic" mom group drama.

The 40-year-old actress - who has daughters Jupiter, four, and Emerson, 15 months, with husband Christpher French - recently penned an essay for The Cut about cutting ties with her friends last year and she's now shared a cryptic post on Instagram alongside a video of herself doing yoga with a desert landscape in the background.

She wrote: "Find your strength within. Coming February 1st. @beingfrenshe (sic)"

Meanwhile, although the High School Musical star's essay has sparked speculation she was referring to the likes of Hilary Duff, Mandy Moore and Meghan Trainor, singer Willa Ford has spoken out to insist some of her friends "didn't deserve" the attention they have received as a result of the essay.

The I Wanna Be Bad hitmaker's pals, make-up artist Kelsey Deenihan and businesswoman Janice Gott, have also been pictured hanging out with the moms group in the past, and Willa insisted they are "wonderful" people.

She told Page Six Radio: "Kelsey and Janice are ride or dies. I went through a divorce. These were women who were by my side, who are wonderful humans just in general, not just in the business.

"My girlfriends didn't deserve this. They're not actresses. Their faces didn't deserve to be plastered."

The 44-year-old star stressed she doesn't know what happened within the group, but she has also met Ashley in the past and found her to be "so lovely".

She said: "Everybody has always been nice to me and wonderful to me, so I don't know what happened," she said. "Mean things can happen. We can also make mistakes as people.

"Feeling left out is a real feeling. It's c***. We all know that.

"But I don't know what happened and I do know two of those women really well and I know that bullying is not in their DNA. So I just feel like it would've been nice if the communication maybe could have been done differently.

"I actually think this whole thing does resolve itself, as much as I know everybody wants a reality show about it."

Ashley first discussed leaving her "toxic" group of mom friends in a blog post.

She said: "Here's the thing nobody prepared me for: Mom groups can turn toxic.

"Not because the moms themselves are toxic people, but because the dynamic shifts into an ugly place with mean-girl behaviour. I know this from personal experience."

Ashley explained there were group text chains that "didn't include everyone" and there were "hangouts" she didn't get invited to.

In her essay for The Cut, she went on to open up about how she started to feel "excluded", writing: "I was certain that I'd found my village.

"But over time, I began to wonder whether that was really true. 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.

"Another time, at one of the mom's dinner parties, I realised where I sat with her - which was at the end of the table, far from the rest of the women. I was starting to feel frozen out of the group, noticing every way that they seemed to exclude me."