It’s been nearly 15 years since Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey called it quits, but the former couple are often still asked about their relationship and former reality series, Newlyweds.
Simpson and Lachey tied the knot in 2002. After less than four years of marriage, she filed for divorce, citing “irreconcilable differences” in December 2005.
“After three years of marriage, and careful thought and consideration, we have decided to part ways,” the twosome said in a joint statement at the time. “This is the mutual decision of two people with an enormous amount of respect and admiration for each other. We hope that you respect our privacy during this difficult time.”
Lachey was the first one to open up about the end of their marriage during a revealing interview with Rolling Stone in 2006.
“I’ll tell you how I knew my marriage was over. I was told,” he said at the time, claiming that the “With You” singer pulled the plug on their relationship in a limo after the American Music Awards. “She said something about how we hadn’t really been getting along and then said, ‘I think I want a divorce.’ That blindsided me. I basically said, ‘Please, let’s sleep on it.’ But when we woke up the next day, Wednesday morning, she was still sure.”
The twosome finalized their divorce in June 2006. While Lachey started seeing now-wife Vanessa Lachey (née Minnillo) shortly after the split, Simpson was linked to Tony Romo and John Mayer before she met now-husband Eric Johnson. In November 2010, both singers announced their engagements to their current spouses within a week of each other.
“I am extremely, extremely happy for him,” Simpson told Ryan Seacrest at the time. “My mom actually called me and said that everyone was saying that I was ‘saddened.’ I was just in complete shock. I couldn’t be more happy for Nick.”
A week after Lachey got down on one knee, Simpson confirmed she was set to marry Johnson.
“I will say the same thing I always say: I wish her the very best,” the 98 Degrees singer told Us Weekly at the time.
Lachey and the former TRL host, who wed in 2011, share three kids: Camden, Brooklyn and Phoenix. Simpson, for her part, married Johnson in 2014. They share daughters Maxwell and Birdie and son Ace.
Scroll through to read about the end of Simpson and Lachey’s marriage in their own words:
“It breaks my heart that I couldn’t make Jessica happy. I wanted to be everything to my wife,” Lachey admitted to Rolling Stone in April 2006. “I wanted her to look at me with love in her eyes, the way she did at the beginning, and have her feel like I was the most wonderful, awe-inspiring man on the planet. And when that stopped, it was the worst feeling in the world.”
The boybander told the magazine at the time that he’d “marry her all over again.”
“I still love her,” he said. “It would be a lot easier to walk away if I didn’t.”
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“He is a good guy. And neither of us wanted to let anyone down, including ourselves,” Simpson told Glamour in August 2006. “I don't have anything bad to say about him at all. I don't. And I do have something to lose by talking about it.”
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"I think any person who I'm gonna date for longer than six months, I definitely am investing in something long-term,” Simpson, who was linked to Romo at the time, told Cosmopolitan in November 2008. “If I get married again, then it will be the last time. Nick will always be a part of my life, but next time, I'm marrying the right one."
The actress also admitted to the outlet that she “cried [her] eyes out” while watching sister Ashlee Simpson marry Pete Wentz. (The couple, who share son Bronx, split in 2011 after four years of marriage.)
"The vows were the hardest thing to hear. You hear everything that you [once] promised — the ‘’til death do us part.’ [I felt] like I'd let down everybody in my life,” the “I Wanna Love You Forever” songstress recalled at the time. “When I was standing up there, I was like, 'I hope people aren't thinking about the fact that I'm divorced.' I don't want to be known as that girl."
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Simpson told Vanity Fair in May 2009 that she doesn’t believe Newlyweds affected their marriage. “Because we enjoyed watching those episodes, and that will always be a time I cherish,” she said. “It made me understand what marriage is, what love is, what commitment is.”
Simpson reiterated her point on The View in February 2020. “I really don’t [think the show led to our divorce],” she said. “It is hard to be on camera. I mean, we started shooting like six weeks into our marriage. … I couldn't stay in something that felt destructive, and I needed to be free to be myself and to grow up. He was 8 years older than me. I had a lot of learning to do to really be at the place where I could be a wife.”
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The designer compared divorce to a “death in the family” during an August 2009 interview with Glamour.
“It was hard to imagine I would ever walk down the aisle again. You go through the mourning stage,then the rebellion,and then all of a sudden you have to find life by yourself,” Simpson said. “Once you do that, you feel complete and that’s the only time you can truly fall in love again, and give yourself over completely to another person.”
She added that she “loved everything about marriage.”
“I loved having a companion to wake up with and have barbecues with. But things happen and people grow apart. I don’t really ever talk about the divorce because it was a heart-wrenching thing to go through. It’s a very,very personal thing,” she explained.
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Lachey made headlines in May 2013 when Andy Cohen asked him the best part of about “not having Joe Simpson as a father-in-law” anymore.
“I don't have to play grab-ass under the table on Easter Sunday,” he quipped on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen.
He also revealed at the time that he hadn’t spoken to Simpson in “six years.”
“It was like another lifetime ago,” he said.
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"I think in our situation, that was probably the best thing that could have ever happened is that we didn't have kids," Lachey told Jenny McCarthy in November 2014. "All things being equal, it was the best thing probably for the both of us that we went on with our lives and she's obviously happily married with two [kids]. I'm happy married about to have two so it all worked out the way it was supposed to work out."
He added that there is “no contact” between the former spouses.
"I wouldn't say it's friends, but I wouldn't say it's enemies,” Lachey explained. “We've both moved on with our lives and I think we're very happy with the way it went. It's not animosity, it's not friendship, it's just kind of nothing."
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When asked what her biggest money mistake was over the years during a September 2015 appearance on CNBC’s Closing Bell, Simpson quipped, “For some reason, I thought of my first marriage.”
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Simpson referred to Lachey as her “first love” in her 2020 memoir Open Book.
“Nick loved the fact I was so strong in my faith and that I had this wide-eyed innocent approach to life. When he proposed in 2002, I said yes,” she penned. “We were young and pioneering our way through reality television, always miced and always on. We worked and we were great at it but when it came time to being alone, we weren’t great at it anymore.”
She added: “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.”
Simpson admitted in her 2020 memoir, Open Book, that she had an emotional affair with her Dukes of Hazzard costar Johnny Knoxville.
“We wrote these flowery love letters back and forth, often at night with Nick passed out in the bed next to me,” she wrote about Knoxville, who was also married at the time. “We talked about music, and I would listen to Johnny Cash songs he suggested just to feel like we were still together. … It’s like Johnny and I were prison pen pals, two people who wanted too much to be with each other but were kept apart — by bars, by our stars, by our respective spouses.”
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According to Simpson, Lachey begged for her to call off their divorce.
“‘Please don’t leave me. ... I love you so much,’ he said,” Simpson wrote in her February 2020 memoir. “’Love is not enough,’ I said. ‘If love was enough, I would stay forever. But it isn’t enough. We have to like each other. We have to be friends.'"
She added: “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.”
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Lachey, who told Us exclusively that he didn’t read Simpson’s book, told Hoda Kotb that he is “happy” for his ex during a February 2020 appearance on the Today show.
“There's definitely a mutual respect there, obviously it was a long time ago and we've all moved on,” he said.
Things got awkward, however, when Kotb told Nick and wife Vanessa Lachey that Simpson said the couple once sent her a gift.
"I feel bad, I'm sorry, you said somebody sent her … it wasn't us, but thank you, whoever sent it,” Vanessa said. “I don't know her address.”
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Simpson admitted during a February 2020 appearance on The Dr. Oz Show that she should have signed a prenup before she married Lachey. “The funny thing is that Nick wanted me to sign a prenup but I was so offended,” she recalled. “I’m like, ‘But we’re going to be together for the rest of our lives. We’re saying our vows to God and in front of all of our family and friends. This is never going to end,’ and we didn’t sign a prenup.”
In Open Book, Simpson also recalled being upset about the situation because she believed their “marriage would never end.”
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Simpson told Ryan Seacrest that filming Newlyweds when she was in her early 20s was one of the most “empowering” things she’s ever done. “I do believe that doing Newlyweds is what made people — it’s what launched my brand,” she said in March 2020. “Absolutely, I would go back and do it all over again. It’s never something I wouldn’t do again, just maybe wouldn’t have done a third season.”
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Simpson released a paperback version of her Open Book memoir in March 2021 with diary pages from her past, including the time of her 2005 split from the 98 Degrees singer.
“I didn’t want to be married any longer, but I was also afraid to be alone with ‘no one to call my own but the night,’” Simpson wrote alongside an entry from the time about her split. “The house is hushed, everything is still. I sit in solitude, to cry, to feel alone. Giving up on giving in.”
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After Lachey started dating his now-wife Vanessa, Simpson wrote a diary entry about feeling hurt at his quick rebound romance, which she shared in her paperback memoir. “So Nick, u r with another already?" she wrote in a 2006 entry about Lachey’s new relationship. ”Seems that you forgot the love you spoke to me … It is only because I am alone in the dark [with] no one to call my own, but the night. Oh night, love me tenderly, love me quiet, find me happy, find me right. Oh lord, let your star shine upon me tonight."
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The designer recalled letting her ex-husband back into her life briefly after their 2005 split, telling Tamron Hall in March 2021 that it was “really wrong” to do so. Simpson revealed that Lachey showed her his “What’s Left of Me” music video in 2006, which featured Vanessa Lachey, whom he met on the video set and later married in 2011.
“I opened my doors back to him one night out of weakness,” she explained of the encounter. “I opened my doors back up to, I don’t even know, to see if it was better a year later, months later. And then he showed me this. I think he had a TV show or something.” The song, which was off his What’s Left of Me album shook Simpson when she realized it was about them. “It was literally all the songs that he was writing while we were together,” she added. “So, I mean, I think he hated me if he’s saying ‘I Can’t Hate You Anymore.’”
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