A Massachusetts woman who asked for help finding her husband who she claimed had “ghosted” her and their children has called off the search after receiving “literally hundreds of messages” in response.
Ashley McGuire’s call for aid was posted on Facebook earlier this week and then spread to other platforms, with one X thread about her post attracting tens of millions of views. Her post said her husband, a British chef named Charles Withers, had decided when she was pregnant last year that “being a husband and a dad wasn’t the lifestyle he wanted anymore and he ghosted, like gone without a trace.”
“He has one baby he hasn’t seen in over a year, and one he’s never met,” McGuire’s post continued. “He’s moved somewhere out of state and changed his phone number.”
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She said that getting divorced from someone “who’s completely unreachable is really tough and drawn out,” and so she was hoping to track him down in order to “get his signature on a few papers so I can finally close this chapter and move on with my life.”
McGuire added that she’d heard her husband is “going by ‘Charlie’ now” and said he’s “charming AF.” “He’s a chef and probably working in the hospitality industry somewhere,” she wrote. “He’s probably never mentioned having a wife or kids back in Massachusetts. If you know him, if you’re working with him, if you’re dating him or friends with him, can you please have him get in touch with me or let me know where I can find him.”
Within a day of McGuire’s post, several women in a “Are We Dating the Same Guy” Facebook group in Texas claimed to have matched with Withers on dating apps, according to a TikTok video cited by the New York Post.
In an update, McGuire said the response to her plea had been “absolutely insane” and said she’d gotten “MORE than enough information to locate” her husband. “I have literally hundreds of messages to sort through, some with information and some with support and I appreciate all of them,” she wrote. “Single moms are a special breed, and I know a lot of you have gone the same situation I have.”
McGuire added that she does not wish Withers “any type of ill will.” “I sincerely appreciate all of your support, but please do not make threats, spread hate, or try to go out and locate him,” she wrote. “Truly I only want to see this situation resolved so me and my children can restart our lives and fix the damage done.”
Speaking in an interview with Boston’s WJMN radio, McGuire revealed that Withers has contacted her since her post went viral.
“He did reach out to me last night,” she said Monday. “He sent me a text.” McGuire said she’d been incorrect in her post when she said that he’d changed his phone number, saying he still had access to one that she’d previously used to contact him.
“He’d been ignoring me for a couple of months on it,” McGuire said, explaining why she thought it had changed.
She went on to say that her husband said he “would be happy to talk” and expressed concern about his employer being named online as a possible privacy or security risk.
Radio host Ashlee Feldman—who is a personal friend of McGuire’s—also quoted McGuire as having joked off-air about being “so happy for the solar eclipse” to distract some of the frenzied public attention away from her family drama.
“People can say whatever they want about me,” McGuire said. “They can think whatever they want about me. But when all the dust settles I will make sure that everyone is taken care of.”
