Mandy Moore Backs Hilary Duff as a ‘Sensational Icon Queen’ Amid ‘Toxic’ Mom Group Fallout
Mandy Moore isn’t saying much about the “toxic mom group” discourse — but she is making it clear where she stands with Hilary Duff.
On Jan. 29, Moore attended Duff’s intimate Small Rooms, Big Nerves tour stop at The Wiltern in Los Angeles and shared clips from the show on Instagram Stories. “Broke my brick time to say that my bud is a sensational icon queen, giving us all what we needed,” she wrote over one video, adding, “You are forever a superstar!” per Us Weekly.
Moore’s posts showed Duff onstage and panned to the crowd, where their husbands — Taylor Goldsmith and Matthew Koma — danced along together. Other friends from the same circle of Los Angeles moms, including cookbook author Gaby Dalkin and executive Janice Lee, were also spotted at the show, according to multiple outlets, suggestig that the core group is still very much intact.
The public show of support comes weeks after Ashley Tisdale French’s viral essay for The Cut, “Breaking Up With My Toxic Mom Group,” which described feeling excluded from a once-comforting circle of mothers and deciding to walk away. Tisdale did not name anyone in the piece, but follow-up coverage in outlets connected the story to a well-known “cool mom club” that has, in various interviews, included Duff, Moore, Meghan Trainor and other L.A. moms.
That same group has been under a microscope all month. On Jan. 7, Duff’s husband Koma posted a mocked-up Cut cover to Instagram Stories with the headline, “When You’re The Most Self-Obsessed Tone Deaf Person On Earth, Other Moms Tend To Shift Focus To Their Actual Toddlers,” widely read as a response to Tisdale’s essay. Tisdale’s husband, Christopher French, and other celebrities have since weighed in on social media, keeping the conversation going as talks of a movie adaptation of the celeb mom feud start to take hold.
At the same time, Duff’s family dynamics have been pulled into the spotlight. Earlier this week, Tisdale and Hilary’s sister Haylie Duff shared a playdate photo of their daughters “under the table,” a moment that drew attention because Hilary and Haylie have not been photographed together publicly since 2019 and Hilary recently debuted a song titled “We Don’t Talk,” with lyrics that seem to be about estranged relatives.
Moore has spoken about the same friend group for years, long before any of the recent headlines. In a 2022 interview with InStyle, she said she was “very, very grateful” to be part of Duff’s “cool mom club,” calling Duff “the coolest” and “a super-mom” who helped organize mommy-and-me classes and dinners when their kids were babies.
Now, with mom-group think pieces, Instagram unfollows and family subplots all circulating at once, Moore’s latest update kept the emphasis on the music — and on Duff. In front of a sold-out hometown crowd, her message stayed simple: this is her friend, this is their shared community, and in her words, Hilary Duff remains a “sensational icon queen.”
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