Nick Lachey is opening up about his divorce from Jessica Simpson.
The Love Is Blind cohost wed the “Irresistible” singer in 2002 and the couple documented their lives on MTV’s Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica. However, the stars announced their separation just three years later in November 2005. Their divorce was finalized in 2006.
“I, too, was previously married, divorced, so I understand the hurt, the scars that exist from that,” Nick, 51, told a contestant on the Wednesday, December 4, episode of Netflix’s The Ultimatum season 3, per E! News.
“Don’t let your past define your future,” Nick advised the contestant, adding that following his divorce from Simpson, he found happiness again with his current wife and Ultimatum cohost, Vanessa Lachey.
“What I truly always wanted in my life, which was to have a beautiful marriage and a beautiful family, if I hadn’t retained my belief in that, I wouldn’t have ever realized the beautiful life I have with this woman,” he said.
Nick and Vanessa, 44, got married in 2011 and have three children together: sons Camden, 12, and Phoenix, 7, and daughter Brooklyn, 9.
On an April 2022 episode of The Ultimatum, Vanessa also addressed Nick’s divorce and dating the 98 Degrees singer soon after his separation from Simpson. “He was literally in a very public marriage and a very public divorce, and I had to go through all that s–t very publicly and it was very hard for us,” she explained. “It wasn’t until the moment that he was like, ‘I’m gonna let it go,’ and I said, ‘I’m gonna let it go,’ and we truly committed to each other. We literally fell deeper and harder than we ever could.”
In her 2020 memoir, Open Book, Simpson admitted that she was hurt when her ex-husband moved on so quickly after their breakup. When Nick’s romance with Vanessa began, his divorce from the Texas native was still not finalized.
“So, Nick, you’re with another already? Seems that you forgot the love you spoke to me,” the fashion designer wrote in diary entries included in the paperback edition of the book, released in March 2021. “I’m saddened beyond belief. Alone in the dark, with no one to call my own.”
In November, a source exclusively told Us Weekly that Simpson and her husband Eric Johnson are “living separately right now” after the couple sparked divorce speculation. (The couple married in 2014 and share three children, sons Maxwell, 12, and Ace, 11, and daughter Birdie Mae, 5.)
The estranged duo — who were both seen without their wedding bands in recent months — are “trying to figure out a separation without disrupting their kids’ lives as much as possible,” a second insider said, noting Simpson and Johnson, 45, are “still figuring things out.”
A third source told Us, “Jessica is heartbroken,” explaining the separation has been “an incredibly difficult time” for the singer. “[It was] not an easy decision for her,” the insider said.