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For some quick context, Ashley — who has two young daughters — detailed being excluded from a friendship group of fellow moms in a candid essay for the Cut earlier this week.
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She wrote in part, “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 realized 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.”
Ashley also recalled confronting the moms via text, writing, “This is too high school for me and I don’t want to take part in it anymore.” She recalled, “It didn’t exactly go over well. Some of the others tried to smooth things over. One sent flowers, then ignored me when I thanked her for them. Another tried to convince me that everyone assumed I’d been invited to gatherings and just hadn’t shown up.”
“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,” she added.
Several Internet users immediately speculated that Ashley was talking about her group of famous celebrity mom friends, which includes Meghan Trainor, Mandy Moore, and Hilary Duff. Eagle-eyed fans even noticed that Ashley was no longer following Hilary or Mandy on Instagram.
A rep for Ashley ended up denying speculation that her essay had been about said celebrities. However, Hilary’s husband is still jumping to her defense.
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Taking to his Instagram stories, Matthew parodied Ashley’s the Cut article, sharing a photo of his face photoshopped over hers in her cover shoot. The fake tagline read, “A mom group tell all through a father’s eyes,” and then said, “When you’re the most self-obsessed, tone-deaf person on Earth, other moms tend to shift their focus to their actual toddlers.”
Matthew added, “Read my new interview with @thecut.”
Reacting to Matthew’s “shady” and “messy” post, one person wrote of the drama, “We really are just reliving the early 2000s.” Someone else echoed, “My 2000s self is invested in this.”
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“For anyone who’s never been in a Facebook mommy group before…this is it,” another user said.
At the same time, many users raised their eyebrows over Matthew jumping into the conversation. “I mean I hear him and I’m all for protecting your wife… but like that’s between the women folk my guy,” one tweet read, while someone else on Reddit questioned, “Why is the husband responding to this, that feels kind of weird.”
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