Jessica Simpson Reveals She Was Sexually Abused By Family Friend In Upcoming Memoir
Jan. 22 2020, Updated 2:35 p.m. ET
Jessica Simpson leaves no stones unturned in her upcoming memoir "Open Book."
The star, 39, reveals, for the first time, that she was sexually abused at a young age. The traumatic experience, she says, caused her to fall into a vicious cycle of pills and alcohol.
“I was killing myself with all the drinking and pills,” she writes in an excerpt obtained by PEOPLE.
Simpson admits that she only became sober in November 2017, and hasn't had a drink since.
“Giving up the alcohol was easy,” she writes. “I was mad at that bottle. At how it allowed me to stay complacent and numb.”
The fashion designer explains that therapy helped her through it all, but at the same time, getting help was the hardest thing she has ever had to do.
“With work, I allowed myself to feel the traumas I’d been through,” she says.
Simpson explains that the abuse began when she was 6 years old, and “shared a bed with the daughter of a family friend."
“It would start with tickling my back and then go into things that were extremely uncomfortable,” she writes.
Frozen with fear, she worried it was somehow all her fault. “I wanted to tell my parents. I was the victim but somehow I felt in the wrong,” she writes.
At 12 years old, she summoned the courage to tell her parents, Tina and Joe Simpson, while on a road trip.
“I told you something was happening,” her mother yelled as she slapped her father’s arm.
“Dad kept his eye on the road and said nothing,” Simpson writes. “We never stayed at my parents’ friend’s house again, but we also didn’t talk about what I had said.”
Years later, Simpson rose to fame with her music, and later, with her hit reality TV show, Newlyweds, with then-husband Nick Lachey.
In 2010, she managed to create a billion-dollar clothing line: the Jessica Simpson Collection.
She married her longtime partner Eric Johnson in 2014, and now shares three kids, daughter Maxwell, 7, son Ace, 6, and baby girl Birdie, 10 months, with him.