Hilary Duff has revealed she’s still friendly with a very controversial ex almost two decades after the pair split.
Imagine this, it’s 2004, Nickelodeon and Disney shows are popping, you’ve got your scoobies attached to your backpack, your game boy in your pocket, Tamagotchi pinging at you and low-rise jeans are the latest trend.
You flip the page of your favourite teen magazine, and you’re greeted with the weirdest cross-over in history: MTV meets Lizzie McGuire.
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What the hell is going on?
It was a wild year, and especially for Hilary Duff.
It was in July of that year she embarked on a romance that would raise everyone’s eyebrows.
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Duff was 16 at the time when she began dating Good Charlotte’s Joel Madden, who was 25 and nine years older.
Even though their relationship was met with critics, mostly due to Madden’s tattoos and piercings, as well as a strange obsession with Duff’s image, the pair were not fussed by the comments.
The romance didn’t last long and in November 2006 they broke up.
Just under two decades after they began dating, the pair met in 2022 for a group date.
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Madden was joined by wife Nicole Richie, and Duff was with her husband Matthew Koma, and also invited Pete Wentz and his partner Meagan Camper to the event.
The actress, who turned 37 today (28 September), was asked in the same year by Vanity Fair about this moment and whether it was important to her to stay friendly with her exes, to which she simply replied ‘no’.
She added: “I do enjoy being friends with him now. One hundred percent.
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“But I don’t need to be friends with all of my exes. This is very situational.”
Thankfully, the person conducting the lie detector test confirmed that Duff was telling the truth.
Phew.
Back in 2015, Duff gave an interview to Cosmopolitan, and she talked about what it was like dating an older man as a teen.
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She said: "I had a 26-year-old boyfriend. So everyone can make their own assumptions about what I was doing."
Madden has also talked about the relationship too, giving Teen People an interview when the pair appeared on the cover in 2006.
They explained how 'slow' their relationship was and acknowledged their large age-gap.
Duff said: "We're on the same level, even though he's so much older.
"Joel is the most respectful boyfriend I've ever had. We had five or six dates before we even kissed."
Madden on the other hand explained that it was ‘the slowest relationship, physically, that I've had’ before stating that if he had a daughter Duff’s age, he wouldn’t allow her to date an older man like him.
"I wouldn't let it happen," he said.
Topics: Music, Celebrity, News, Sex and Relationships
Britt Jones