Nick Lachey Details Recent Run-In With Ex-Wife Jessica Simpson 20 Years After Their Split

Nick Lachey opened up about recently sharing a flight with his ex-wife, Jessica Simpson.

“It was strangely OK,” Lachey said on the Wednesday, May 13, episode of Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen, noting that Simpson, 45, was on the plane to Hawaii with her mother, her three children and estranged husband Eric Johnson.

“You know, it’s been 20 years, and so we hadn’t seen each other in those 20 years and then spent six and a half hours on a flight to Hawaii together. When I say ‘spent,’ [I mean] in the same vicinity. Everyone was very cordial, very respectful,” Nick, 52, said, adding that he was on the flight with his current wife, Vanessa Lachey, 45, and their three children.

He said, “It was honestly … it was fine.”

Us Weekly reported in April that Nick and Simpson had ended up on the same flight the month prior. “They actually did say hello, and it was a nice, cordial conversation,” a source shared at the time.

Nick and Simpson were married from 2002 to 2006 and starred on the hit MTV reality show Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica. They separated in 2005 and finalized their divorce the following year.

Simpson shared her thoughts about her relationship with Nick in her 2020 memoir, Open Book, writing, “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. We were young and pioneering our way through reality television, always miked 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.”

In her memoir, Simpson also opened up about having 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.”

In December 2024, Nick talked about the emotional impact of his divorce from the singer.

“I, too, was previously married, divorced, so I understand the hurt, the scars that exist from that,” Nick told a contestant on an episode of Netflix’s The Ultimatum season 3.

“Don’t let your past define your future,” Nick advised the contestant, sharing how he found love with Vanessa following his divorce from Simpson.