Jenny Mollen Defends 'Toxic Boyfriend' Caption After Controversial Photo With 12-Year-Old Son as She Insists Post Was About 'Grief'

Jenny Mollen is standing by her recent controversial Instagram post where she referred to her 12-year-old son, Sid, as a "toxic boyfriend."

In the June 8 edition of her Substack newsletter, The Best Friend Experience, the writer, 47, addressed the backlash she received by claiming that “what strangers saw as scandal, [she] saw as grief.”

In the snap, Mollen lay on top of her child on a bed, writing, “Your eldest will be the most toxic boyfriend you ever had.”

Fans fumed over the strange social media share.

“This is creepy and wildly inappropriate,” one person wrote, while another expressed, “As a boy mom, I’m deeply appalled. The first caption was reprehensible. I can’t imagine thinking that was an appropriate thing to say about your child.”

However, Mollen defended her words.

“Last week, the internet called me a child molester for posting a photo of myself holding my son. The picture was taken on a Monday night after he returned from a weekend away,” she explained. “There’s something devastating about realizing your children can survive without you, that they can be content somewhere else. Happy, even. And that the security you once felt in being their entire world was never meant to last.”

The actress noted her son is the same age she was when her own mother informed her she “didn’t know how to be a mom anymore.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision,” she admitted. “But children don’t experience decisions. They experience absence.”

Mollen detailed how she would only see her mom every month or two months, and as a result, she would need to fly between cities as an “unaccompanied minor.”

“There were no emails back then. No FaceTimes. No texts. We spoke occasionally, but not about anything that mattered,” she recalled. “Or maybe everything mattered at that age, and I was just still too naive to see it. I was learning how to talk to boys, how to shave my legs, how to become a woman in a world that despises women, without my mother there to guide me.”

Now that Mollen is a mother, she feels a deep connection to her child — whom she co-parents with estranged husband Jason Biggs — but sometimes struggles as she watches him mature.

“Loving a child is a vomit-inducing free fall, and I’ve spent the last twelve years writing about it. Not the highlight reel. Not the version that comes on Christmas cards or frames before you own them,” she emphasized. “The version where I’m trapped in my son’s bunk bed for ten consecutive years. The version where he demands my undivided attention only to inform me that his childhood blanket is his favorite member of our family. The version where I’m on my hands and knees, covered in somebody else’s blood and vomit, promising them that everything is going to be okay.”