There are just so many juicy details in Jessica Simpson‘s new memoir, we hardly know where to begin.
We’ve already shared excerpts from Open Book about her alcohol and pill addiction, her on-again, off-again relationship with John Mayer, her desire to hook up with Johnny Knoxville WHILE SHE WAS MARRIED.
Related: Jessica Kissed Justin Timberlake After Her Divorce
But there’s so much about the marriage to — and divorce from — Nick Lachey we had to gather it all in one place.
So far Nick has been the only ex to respond to the book so far, and he pretended not to have seen anything in it. Well, he’ll have trouble keeping that up now with all this out there…
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How They Met
Jessica fell for Nick right away.
“The thing about falling in love with someone in a boyband is that you’re not alone. There are a lot of girls out there who had already complied all the details on Nick Lachey.”
Ha! So true. But her story is her own. The future spouses first met at the Holly Christmas Parade in 1998. She writes:
“At eighteen, my usual move was to be coy and look away, but I didn’t. He came over, walking in more causal version of the onstage boy-bander saunter I’d come to see him do time and again, but more purposeful. ‘Hi, I’m Nick,’ he said. ‘Hello my life,’ I thought.”
Sploosh! LOLz!
Nick also had a secret weapon for the next time they met, at a Teen People party:
“He brought his mom, and part of the fairy tale was that he said to her, ‘Mom your mission for tonight is to get me in good with this girl.'”
It worked. He got her number — and as she later learned dumped the girl he was seeing at the time.
Her First Time
Fans will remember how important it was to Jessica to save herself for marriage. She still remembers the moment she told Nick, and she didn’t know how it had landed:
“He paused, taking it all in. I thought, ‘Well, Jessica, this dreamboat has sailed.'”
But he didn’t run.
“‘I respect that,’ he said. ‘Thank you for telling me.'”
And he did respect it. She makes a point of saying how important was he was respectful about her chastity because even going to second base was a huge deal for the pristine pop star. She describes:
“He stayed patient, and how the relationship progressed physically was always up to me. He was the first guy who ever touched my breasts, and it was such a big deal to me that I made my mom take me bra shopping for the occasion. I spent an hour in a Victoria’s Secret before I settled on a purple one.”
Awww! You’d hardly believe this was in the late 90s, it’s like something straight out of a very special Leave It To Beaver. VERY special. LOLz!
She says Nick turned her on so much it was difficult to keep her promise in her pants though:
“One time, he hugged me, and I thought I was just going to burst into flames. I had to push him away, not because I didn’t trust him, but because I was teetering on the edge of just giving in.”
That’s generally how we’ve been around Nick, too. But she held strong, and they eventually they did have their first time — on their wedding night.
Unfortunately she was also famous, and so was her faith-based abstinence. Meanwhile she was also an international sex symbol. So with her wedding came a LOT of questions about the highly anticipated first time — questions she was not ready to answer…
“I’d built up this anticipation in my mind that the first time I had sex with my husband had to be this transcendent experience where the heavens parted. What I didn’t know then is that everyone’s first time is awkward, and that is part of it. And that it’s OK, but at the time, it’s tough to understand. I had joined a long line or virgins in my family who said yes to forever for that one experience.”
Yeah. Unfortunately it’s less Nicholas Sparks and more this:
A Shaky Foundation
The couple actually broke up but ended up getting back together, Jessica writes, in the wake of 9/11. We remember the September 11 attacks were like that, deeply affecting and bringing a lot of people together.
Nick proposed shortly after, but it wasn’t happily ever after. See, the singer told Jess he wanted a prenup, and that was NOT something she was comfortable with. In fact, she says she straight up “exploded” at him when he suggested it.
“As we got closer to the wedding, he casually mentioned that maybe we should talk about getting a prenup. Part of the tabloid mythology of our marriage is my dad played hardball and refused. No, this was an intimate discussion between a man and his soon-to-be wife. Which is to say that I exploded.”
Eventually she won that battle, and they didn’t get one.
But yeah, not a good start for a marriage…
Despite how it ended Jessica writes that she has no regrets about marrying Nick:
“I was 22, and I had just pledged my life and destiny of this man. And I don’t regret it. Nick was meant to be my husband. No one else was supposed to have my virginity.”
TV Newlyweds
Nick and Jessica were unique for their time in that we saw a lot of their marriage on their MTV reality show, Newlyweds. But we only saw what Jessica wanted us to see…
“I wanted my marriage to look perfect. I didn’t mind if I looked dumb, but I wanted people to see the fairy tale in Nick. In us. I had the Instagram-girlfriend syndrome before it was a thing, and I wanted the world to see my husband in the best light because I was hopelessly in love with him.”
Unfortunately, she says, Nick wasn’t living up to his fairy tale ideal:
“I wanted people to believe he was everyone’s vision of a leading man. The problem is, Nick could hit marks, but he couldn’t improv any lines.”
Ouch!
Jessica says the couple never got too real while the cameras were rolling. They even knew how to distract producers with shiny objects. And by shiny objects we mean…
“Talking about our sex life was a classic way to get the crew distracted from some issue. That was always something they seemed to react to and would use to lighten up the plot.”
Eventually Jessica says she was “sick of lying” and mostly bailed on the show. With so little footage they cobbled whatever they could:
“They had to do a clip show for the last one, where we pretended we wanted to move out of the house but changed our minds.”
Yep. All that was fake.
‘A Reliable Cycle’
When they first met, Nick was the bigger star, what with his super popular boy band. But problems bubbled up for the couple as Jessica’s star was on the rise — and eventually shot through the stratosphere! She writes:
“I didn’t want to outshine him, because that just wasn’t what I knew. He seemed so much older than me, my guide in everything. I want him to feel like he could show me all that he knew — about the business, about the world.”
She could tell it was a problem for him because he couldn’t be proud of her success:
“If Nick acknowledged how much I was working, he would see that he wasn’t, and he was too much of a hard worker to face that on.”
Jessica says the couple fell into what she calls “a reliable cycle” of petty bickering. Nick would criticize her over “something small” (like, small enough to fit in a tuna can?), and she would go off on him and “make it about something later in our relationship or the pressure I was under in my career.” Doesn’t sound too healthy, does it?
As things got worse the cycle became more of a downward spiral. As they bickered, Jessica began getting the impression her man wanted to stray and “accuse [Nick] of having a wandering eye.” Those accusations would cause him to hit back, saying she “was the one causing the problems” in the relationship.
That’s when he started disappearing on her.
Nick The Ghost
When things started to get really bad, Jessica writes, Nick developed a bad habit of ghosting her — long before the term became popular:
“He would go out of town and not answer his phone. Vegas or Miami with his boys. Or he would just stay out late to teach me a lesson.”
Back in the early 2000s she couldn’t just track his phone and figure out where he was going. But she knows anyway:
“He had a group of guy friends who used him to get into places and enjoy VIP treatment at strip clubs and bars. He liked that scene, and I thought it was gross.”
Sure, she was skeeved out by her hubby being surrounded by strippers, but does she think he ever crossed a line into actual cheating during those times?
She remembers once during filming a producer brought up a tabloid report of Nick doing “some vague thing with a porn star” to get an on-camera reaction from Jess. It worked. And that was just the first of those reports. Eventually she says she “just didn’t know what to believe.”
They tried marriage counseling, but Nick ghosted that, too — he just stopped going.
The Split
Eventually things just got to a breaking point for the couple. Their fights turned cruel; Jess specifically recalls Nick once saying to her:
“Your friends don’t exist. You just pay them to be around you. And your parents are only around because they are on the payroll.”
Wow. Damn.
Jessica says she was the one who asked for a divorce, and Nick actually fought her on it; she claims “he immediately tried to talk me out of leaving him.” But she was done. When he was out of town, she got all her stuff and moved out.
This time she ghosted him.
This was not a “conscious uncoupling” as so many Hollywood couples seem to have now, and they are NOT friendly exes. She writes:
“I wish we were the kind of people who could divorce and stay friends. We weren’t, and I regret that my actions hurt him.”
Hmm. We guess Vanessa Lachey was honest when she laughed off the idea she or Nick would have bought Jess a gift.
One Last Hookup
They may not have been friendly as exes, but there was one time they got friendly.
Jessica talks about how it felt see him do publicity for his breakup album What’s Left Of Me:
“I watched him portray himself as a victim, casting me as this selfish person. He then mentioned that the door was still open for us to get back together. It was so disrespectful and dragged me back into his orbit when I was just starting to leave it.”
Her response to the disrespectful behavior? Surely she ignored it and got on with her life?
Nope!
She invited him over to her home, where he played the entire album for her. And then she had sex with him. She says:
“I didn’t know any other way to make it better, so I slept with him. I know. I wish you were there to stop me, too. It was emotional, yet there was no connection. The whole situation was very dark. I didn’t want the energy in my home. When he walked out the door, I knew I would never see him again.”
Again, it does NOT sound like they’re the type to exchange gifts.
The Divorce Settlement
So… remember how Nick was the one who wanted a prenup, and Jess rejected the idea? That one definitely came back to bite her.
In the end she was a much bigger star, and her manager dad and Nick’s lawyers “continued to fight over how much money I had to give him” for quite some time. She didn’t have the stomach to fight it out; she remembers:
“They said Nick wanted a certain number, and honestly I don’t remember what it was.”
But eventually her answer was “just give it to him” because she decided she’d make it all back. She writes:
“And then I did. Give or take a billion”
Man, that is a Hollywood tell-all line if we’ve ever seen one!
https://giphy.com/gifs/her-wagon-denies-Kvr6mHJfigfhC
What do YOU think of all these new details??
[Image via Nikki Nelson/WENN.]
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