Christy Carlson Romano has revealed that her Cadet Kelly romance with Shawn Ashmore ended with her being ghosted. Teenage love is messy enough without a film crew nearby, and the former Disney Channel star was living it at full volume. Years later, Romano is revisiting those days while preparing a memoir about growing up in the spotlight. Some chapters are still waiting for a proper reply from the other side.

While Hollywood teaches young stars how to smile on cue, Romano says it never covered how to handle a vanishing act.

Christy Carlson Romano says Shawn Ashmore ended their romance by simply going silent. The two were co-stars in the 2002 Disney Channel movie Cadet Kelly, with Hilary Duff, when Romano was a teenager.

"I was eventually ghosted and had heard ‘his team’ thought I wasn’t famous enough," she wrote on Instagram.

She then added, "Hollywood is brutal for a young girl. It’s why I wrote this book," about her memoir Once Upon a Trainwreck.

Romano wrote on Instagram that the pair dated through the summer of filming and for a few months afterward. That account differs from June 2022, when she told E! News the two had gone on only a few dates. Back then, she called Ashmore a true gentleman and a very nice guy. Ashmore has yet to publicly address the claim, while Romano’s memoir, Once Upon a Trainwreck, hits bookstores on October 6.

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While one costar vanished from her life, another stayed right beside her on set, though the two grew up in very different worlds.

On the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast, Christy Carlson Romano described her relationship with Shia LaBeouf as oil and water. She traced it to how differently they were raised, calling him a loose, Venice Beach sort of kid. Romano grew up type A, much like her Even Stevens character Ren Stevens. LaBeouf's lifestyle, in her telling, was far more chaotic, and that contrast, she suggests, explains the friction between them on set.

Romano was careful to frame the comparison as context, and she credited LaBeouf for finding his own manager at age eight. Her story joins a long list of former Disney stars looking back on their childhoods in the public eye. Bella Thorne, for one, has said she and Zendaya were pitted against each other while playing best friends on Shake It Up. Ghosted by Shawn Ashmore, Romano is now writing back.

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