Jessica Simpson Gets Real About John Mayer, Tony Romo, Her Parents’ Divorce, Alcoholism and More in ‘Open Book’

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Jessica Simpson Gets Real About John Mayer, Tony Romo, Her Parents’ Divorce, Alcoholism and More in ‘Open Book’

Jessica Simpson didn’t hold back while writing about ex-husband Nick Lachey in her new memoir, Open Book, but he certainly wasn’t the only ex she put on blast. Following her split from Lachey in 2005, the “With You” singer started seeing John Mayer. "I would get up to go to the bathroom, and John would ask, 'Where are you going?' While I was married, my ex-husband couldn't be bothered to figure out what city I was in,” she wrote in the book, which was released on Tuesday, February 4. “It felt safe to be desired. I know John would never cheat on me, and that confidence was a new feeling for me." While Simpson and Mayer had a sexual connection, their on-again, off-again relationship took an emotional toll on the fashion designer. She eventually moved on from the Grammy winner with NFL player Tony Romo, but Mayer made his way back into her life, ruining her shot at a proposal from the quarterback. Simpson, who went on to marry Eric Johnson in 2014, also got candid about her battle with substance abuse for the first time in the book. [jwplayer WEWXY5SG-l3ahXupL] “I had to strip away all the self-medicating to feel the pain and figure out what was wrong,” she wrote in the introduction. “I’m still doing the work in therapy two times a week resolving those issues.” While Simpson doesn’t know if she plans to be sober for the rest of her life, she is focusing on the now. “With this book, I want the freedom to say, ‘Well, there are no more secrets,’” she wrote. “I have grown into myself and come to a place where I want to be honest about my flaws. If I can do that in front of the world, then I can remain honest with myself.” For details of Simpson’s marriage and divorce from Lachey, head over to Us Weekly’s second Open Book takeaways gallery. Or scroll through for the bombshell revelations about Mayer, Romo and more:

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Jessica Simpson Gets Real About John Mayer, Tony Romo, Her Parents’ Divorce, Alcoholism and More in ‘Open Book’

Jessica Simpson didn’t hold back while writing about ex-husband Nick Lachey in her new memoir, Open Book, but he certainly wasn’t the only ex she put on blast. Following her split from Lachey in 2005, the “With You” singer started seeing John Mayer. "I would get up to go to the bathroom, and John would ask, 'Where are you going?' While I was married, my ex-husband couldn't be bothered to figure out what city I was in,” she wrote in the book, which was released on Tuesday, February 4. “It felt safe to be desired. I know John would never cheat on me, and that confidence was a new feeling for me." While Simpson and Mayer had a sexual connection, their on-again, off-again relationship took an emotional toll on the fashion designer. She eventually moved on from the Grammy winner with NFL player Tony Romo, but Mayer made his way back into her life, ruining her shot at a proposal from the quarterback. Simpson, who went on to marry Eric Johnson in 2014, also got candid about her battle with substance abuse for the first time in the book. [jwplayer WEWXY5SG-l3ahXupL] “I had to strip away all the self-medicating to feel the pain and figure out what was wrong,” she wrote in the introduction. “I’m still doing the work in therapy two times a week resolving those issues.” While Simpson doesn’t know if she plans to be sober for the rest of her life, she is focusing on the now. “With this book, I want the freedom to say, ‘Well, there are no more secrets,’” she wrote. “I have grown into myself and come to a place where I want to be honest about my flaws. If I can do that in front of the world, then I can remain honest with myself.” For details of Simpson’s marriage and divorce from Lachey, head over to Us Weekly’s second Open Book takeaways gallery. Or scroll through for the bombshell revelations about Mayer, Romo and more:

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Body Image Struggles

When Simpson’s eldest daughter, Maxwell, was 6, she revealed that a friend told her bread makes you “fat.” As a result, the musician made it a point to make sure her daughter didn't worry about her diet — like Simpson did for so many years.  

“I even put extra butter on that bread. As I did so, I thought, ‘How does she even know what ‘fat’ is?’” Simpson wrote. “It was a wake-up call. She already has this world to grow up in, and I want her to feel safe enough to love herself and the body that God gave her.”

Simpson then revealed that she was told to lose 15 pounds by her first record label when she was 17. She weighed 118 pounds at the time. “I looked at my parents. They said nothing.”

She subsequently took diet pills for the next 20 years, even drawing six-pack abs on herself after a label exec wasn’t impressed enough with her body in the “I Wanna Love You Forever” music video. 

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The Infamous Mom Jeans

Simpson’s curves made headlines in 2009 when she performed at Radio 99.9 Kiss Country’s annual Chili Cookoff with Rascal Flatts. “It was awful, but the worst part was this: my very first thought was not my pain at becoming a joke or everyone laughing at me. No it was, ‘Oh no, I feel so bad that Tony has to be with the fat girl,’” Simpson wrote. 

While Romo told Simpson that he loved her for her and called the photos being newsworthy “ludicrous,” she was “devastated and confused” by the ordeal.  

The “Come on Over” singer noted in the book that she was “about 120 pounds” when the photos were snapped, wearing a size 25 waist. 

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Childhood Abuse

“The daughter of a family friend was abusing me when my parents brought us for overnight stays,” Simpson wrote, noting that the abuse took place from ages 6 to 12. Her abuser was one year older than her. “After lights out, I would feel her hands on me. It would start with tickling my back and then going into things that were extremely uncomfortable.”

During the second incident, Jessica revealed her sister, Ashlee Simpson, was in the bed too. “I lay between them, fiercely protecting my sister from this monster,” she wrote. “I didn’t want her to feel as disgusting as I felt. … I never let her near Ashlee, but I also never screamed or told her to stop.”

Jessica revealed that she was abused by this girl for six years during their family visits, which took place three times a year. In addition to the incidents in the bed, the girl would make Jessica to go into the closet with her and even snuck into the bathroom to watch her shower. Jessica later learned that the girl was being molested by an older boy.

“I can’t play armchair psychiatrist and guess what her motives were for abusing me, but I can feel her pain and mine at the same time,” she wrote. Jessica eventually told her parents on the car ride home from one of their stays at the family friend’s home. While her mother, Tina Simpson, slapped husband Joe Simpson’s arm and said, “I told you something was happening,” the preacher “kept his eye on the road and said nothing,” per Jessica. 

She explained: ”We never stayed at my parents' friends' house again but we also didn't talk about what I had said.”

When she was in high school, Jessica confided in a friend about what happened to her. After a boy at school took more interest in Jessica than her friend, the teenager told their classmates that Jessica was a lesbian and tried to have sex with her.

“This started some chain reaction thing where three other girls — and I remember their names, too — claimed that I had done the same thing to them,” she wrote. “I’d never even been alone with them, let alone at their houses. But I was the town witch, and torches were going cheap.”

The bullying continued for weeks and made Jessica question herself. “I didn’t understand what it was to be gay,” she wrote. “If I was touched sexually by a girl, and didn’t stop her, did that experience make me gay for life? Did it define me, even if I didn’t want it to happen?”

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Substance Abuse

Simpson frequently referenced taking Tylenol PM as a teenager and young adult to help her sleep on the road after the abuse. “I took each pill like a magic potion, because it freed me,” she wrote. “I was able to sleep in my own bed, or a bed on the road, without needing Ashlee. I didn’t think I was dependent. In fact, those pills actually helped me feel independent.”

While she turned to alcohol during her relationship with Mayer, who she claimed introduced her to Xanax, her substance abuse took a dark turn after she welcomed her first two kids and married Johnson. “As life calmed down, there was time. At first, the feelings would come up like a chill,” she wrote. “I knew what I buried. This feeling of being alone and scared in the dark  was one I’d had since I was abused as a child.” Simpson would eventually start every morning with a shiny tumbler filled with vodka — usually strawberry — and flavored Perrier. “I just needed a drink every morning because I had the shakes.”

She added: “I had a prescription for a stimulant, which gave me the focus to never get messy. … Then at night, still flying from the second stimulant that I had maybe taken at 6 p.m., with tons of alcohol in my system, I would take an Ambien.”

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Parents’ Divorce

As Jessica’s career took off, Joe and Tina’s marriage “had devolved from a friendship to a business arrangement,” according to the singer. While it was clear to Jessica that her parents relationship was strained — Joe even told Jessica he was jealous she had the “courage” to leave Lachey in 2005 — they didn’t split until 2012.

Joe told her he was “leaving” her mother when Jessica was in the hospital, a week before she gave birth to daughter Maxwell. Her relationship with Joe was strained post-split. “They had been married for thirty four years, and I had a hard time being around them together since they’d stop loving each other,” she wrote. “I was blindsided by this news, which triggered his natural salesmanship. He pitched it to me as a positive thing, ‘You gave me the confidence … You gave me the way out.’ Great, I thought to myself, ‘I broke my own heart.’”

Jessica admitted that she chose her mother’s side in the divorce. “When I saw them together with Maxwell and Ace, instead of appreciating it, I found myself mourning my old normal. The new normal sucked,” she explained.

The Prince of Beauty star wrote that Tina learned Joe “betrayed” their marriage in August 2012. “Dad moved on quickly, and maybe he’d planned it so long that he had a running start ahead of my mother,” she wrote. While Joe accused Jessica of firing him as her manager that year because she was “following her mother’s wishes,” Jessica said he made bad deals and empty promises for her at the time. She had to fire him five times before he got the message.

Despite their rocky relationship, Jessica asked her dad to officiate her July 2014 nuptials to Johnson. “My father called me three days before we left for the wedding to tell me he was bringing his friend Jonathan, a young model he often shot for his new photography business,” she wrote. “‘He wasn’t on the list,’ I said. There was a pause. I reminded myself that I needed to accept my father for who he was as he worked it out in real-time.”

On Halloween morning in 2017, the musician played Joe several songs she wrote about his decision to leave her mother titled “Practice What You Preach,” “Rolling With the Punches” and “Party of One.”  

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Halloween 2017

Simpson hit rock bottom on Halloween in 2017 after she drank during Maxwell’s performance at school and had the aforementioned emotional conversation with her father. “Why in the world would I ever be so judgmental of my father when I wasn’t true to what I said in my life?” she asked herself. “Forget what he preached. I was a fraud. I took all the pressures in my head and blamed them on my relationships with other people.”

While she admitted to several people in her home that day that she “was not OK,” Simpson’s Halloween party went on as planned. The musician, however, spent the majority of the night passed out in her bedroom after drinking and taking an Ambien — or two. The following morning, embarrassed that she didn’t take her kids trick-or-treating and didn’t show up for her own party, Simpson was confronted by her friends.

“‘I need to stop. Something’s gotta stop. And if it’s the alcohol that’s during this and making things worse, than I quit,’” she declared to her hair colorist, assistant KoKo and best friend CaCee Cobb. That morning, Simpson had “one more glittercup” of alcohol after she decided she would quit. As she finished it, her pals revealed that they already had a doctor, who specialized in at-home treatment for celebrities, on-call.

“They each shared their invention plans, making it clear they did so because they were afraid I was going to die,” she wrote. “Another plan was to have Linda Perry talk to me. She’s in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and I had recently been working with her creating music. Linda had already reprimanded me about writing under the influence.”

Simpson spoke to the doctor on November 1, 2017, giving her a “complete play-by-play” of her trauma, including the sexual abuse from her childhood and the “abusive, obsessive relationships [she] clung to in adulthood.”

Johnson stopped drinking the same day Simpson did.

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Mickey Mouse Club

Simpson met Ryan Gosling,Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears while auditioning for the Mickey Mouse Club in 1993. “Justin and Ryan were huge flirts, and I was the girl they were focused on,” she wrote. “Ryan was my first hard crush. … I was in love. Before anybody knew how hot Ryan Gosling was going to become, I had a vision.”

After watching Aguilera crush her final audition, Simpson struggled through the singing part of her performance and totally froze during the dancing section. “I walked off the stage and tried not to even look at Justin, who was about to go on. ‘Ooooooooh,’ Justin said, his eyes so wide, his mouth open like a slack-jawed cartoon. ‘What did you just do?’”

After seeing Spears nail the audition, she knew she didn’t get the part. While she crossed paths with all four of the famous faces down the road, an interaction with Timberlake after her split from Lachey was the most memorable. “We were both single, and we got to talking about the old times, leaning more and more into each other, until, suddenly, we shared a nostalgic kiss,” she wrote. “As soon as the kiss was over, he pulled away and got out his phone. ‘I gotta call Gosling … We made a bet at the casting camp. Who was going to kiss you first. I win!’”

She continued: “‘Well then tell Ryan you won big,’ I said as he dialed. ‘Cause the odds were definitely in his favor.’” 

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Constant Comparisons to Britney and Christina

While Simpson’s interaction with Timberlake post-Disney might have been the cringiest, a constant theme at the beginning of her career was her label trying to keep up with Spears and Aguilera’s respective success. “As the label argued over calling me Jessica Simpson or just Jessica, there was a sense that I would get lost among the invasion of teen blondes,” she wrote. “I could not believe these two girls were getting in front of me again.”

The pressure to compete with the pop divas affected Simpson’s struggles with her body image too. “I also had to get even skinnier,” she wrote. “I started the Atkins diet hardcore, envying and resenting anybody who could just eat.” She was down to 103 pounds when her single “Irresistible” was released in 2001.

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Tummy Tucks

Simpson described getting two tummy tucks to “get rid of the stretch marks and loose skin left sagging” from her “back-to-back pregnancies,” despite her doctor’s concern over her liver levels.

Complications from the second operation sent the former Fashion Star judge to the hospital for nine days. “I got an infection — colitis — and was vomiting so much I thought I was going to bust my sutures,” she wrote. “Doctors talked seriously about me needing a blood transfusion.”

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Turning Down ‘The Notebook’

According to Simpson, she read the script for the 2004’s The Notebook but didn’t audition because of the sex scene — and because of her past with Gosling. When she was en route to Texas for Thanksgiving after leaving Lachey, the film aired on the plane. “The movie was on every screen, and I was swept up into it, wishing I had that great love that would be forever,” she wrote. “The flight attendants all felt sorry for me, and I was trying so hard to be polite every time they came over with more Kleenex.”

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On-Again, Off-Again With John Mayer

Simpson first met Mayer at a Grammys party in February 2005 when she was still married to Lachey. They crossed paths at industry events over then next year — “Nick didn’t trust him” — but didn’t start seeing each other romantically until the summer of 2006. According to the “I Think I’m in Love With You” singer, Mayer told her that he loved her song “With You” and even gushed about her Proactiv infomercials at the beginning of their romance. “Again and again, he told me that he was obsessed with me, sexually and emotionally,” she wrote. “The connection was so strong and made me feel seductive, and he spoke about sex and my body in a way that made me feel powerful, at least physically. … He studied every inch of my face and body.” 

Simpson, however, felt insecure with Mayer because she thought he was so much smarter than her, noting she would ask “people who were not dating John how to date John.” 

The pair’s relationship was very on-and-off, with the “Gravity” crooner breaking up with Simpson via email on multiple occasions. “Sometimes it was out of the blue, other times I knew it was coming because my light would start to dim,” she wrote. “John loved me when I was shining and he drew inspiration from that light. When he tapped me dry, he looked at me like I was withholding something from him.” (During one split, Mayer’s only explanation was sending Simpson Aerosmith’s song “Angel” via email.)

Simpson once thought Mayer taking her back after breakups was “a continuation of a love story,” but in reality, she wrote, he was really “coming back for sex with some foolish girl.” 

Years later, Simpson would speak about Mayer in therapy, including a story about the musician breaking up with her before her performance at Dolly Parton tribute Kennedy Center Honors event in December 2006. (She froze on stage and broke down in tears, unable to sing “9 to 5.”) The expert told Simpson that her relationship with Mayer wasn’t love, but rather an obsession.

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Cowboys Fans Attack

Following her tumultuous relationship with Mayer, Simpson started seeing Romo after he referred to her as his “dream girl” during an ESPN interview. “We had a chaste kiss and it felt right. We went public quickly, which was also new for me. It was easy,” she wrote. “[He was] a solid person who was the kind of guy that, as a kid, I imagined marrying.”   

Their relationship wasn’t as beloved by Dallas Cowboys football fans, however. When Simpson attended a game in a pink Romo jersey — and Romo didn’t play well — the crowd started chanting, “Send Jessica home.”   

“I figured Tony would get sick of people calling me a jinx and tell them to knock it off,” she wrote, noting he never did. 

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John Broke Up Her and Tony

Mayer stayed close with Simpson’s sister, Ashlee, and then-husband Pete Wentz in the years following their split. As a result, he would show up at events with their family and keep in touch with her parents. Two years into her relationship with Romo, Mayer started to reach out to her again. After the quarterback saw he sent her a text, Romo broke up with her immediately. "Tony confronted me with it immediately," she wrote, noting she didn’t cheat or do anything inappropriate with Mayer when she was with Romo.  

"I wouldn't be with him because of Tony, and now Tony was gone,” she wrote. “I lost my feeling of agency in my life once again and felt I should just give in and be with John. He had promised forever in my parents' backyard. Who was I to argue?"

While she went back to Mayer, referring to the situation as the “closing scenes of sweeping, epic love story, [in which] the dark romantic hero had beaten out the star quarterback,” she quickly learned the “Free Fallin’” singer hadn’t changed at all. 

“Now I knew the truth. I was a pet bird,” she wrote, claiming Mayer was just using her for song “material.” 

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John’s 'Playboy' Interview

Simpson wrote that Mayer’s racy Playboy interview “sealed” the end of their romance. 

“He talked about me by name in the most degrading terms. You can look it up because I had to be asked about those quotes in every interview I did for about two or three years,” she wrote.

In the 2010 interview, Mayer said, “That girl, for me, is a drug. And drugs aren’t good for you if you do lots of them. Yeah, that girl is like crack cocaine to me. Sexually it was crazy. That’s all I’ll say. It was like napalm, sexual napalm.”

While Mayer apologized to Simpson, she wasn’t OK with his words. "I didn't accept his apology. I deleted all his contact information from my phone,” she explained. “I was done with this man in a way I never thought was possible. When he reached out to me, I changed my number and changed my email. Delete."

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Meeting Eric

Not long after the interview, Simpson met Johnson through mutual friends. "I am grateful [John] removed himself from my life so spectacularly. It cleared the way for destiny to knock on my door,” she wrote. 

The twosome hit it off right away, with Johnson joining Simpson and her pals on her 30th birthday trip to Italy in July 2010. While the duo hadn’t been dating long, she knew she loved the former NFL player and told him she wished for a baby girl on her birthday cake.

“Our sex was always powerful, because we both felt very present in our bodies, but that night it was spiritually explosive,” she wrote. “The kind of love that makes miracles happen.” 

After six months together, Johnson proposed to Simpson on their balcony at exactly 11:11:11 on November 11, 2010.

Johnson and Simpson, who wed in July 2014, share three kids: Maxwell, Ace and Birdie.