Jessica Simpson has opened up about her infamous 2017 interview with Ellen, saying that she was drunk and in a bad place when she filmed it, and she now struggles to watch it back.
The singer sat down with Today‘s Hoda Kotb to talk about the release of her new memoir Open Book, when she spoke about the shocking moment.
“I can’t even watch the interview,” she said, adding that she was not “present”, and knew something was off from the start. “It was a weak moment for me, and I wasn’t in the right place.”
The interview began with Jessica Simpson talking about her birth control device, and telling a rambling story about mermaid wranglers at her child’s recent birthday party.
She couldn’t quite get a handle on how long she had been in a relationship with her husband, then said her longest relationship was with a woman, before correcting herself and adding: “No, not that!”
You can see the original interview below:
.@JessicaSimpson is a performer, a designer, a mom, and owns a billion-dollar business. pic.twitter.com/RINGLz1aXc
— Ellen DeGeneres (@EllenDeGeneres) May 22, 2017
There were concerns for her well-being after the interview, and Simpson admitted to Kotb that: “I had started a spiral and I couldn’t catch up with myself and that was with alcohol.”
In her memoir, the singer revealed that she got to a point where “I was killing myself with all the drinking and pills,” before she finally got sober in November 2017.
“Giving up the alcohol was easy,” she said in her book. “I was mad at that bottle. At how it allowed me to stay complacent and numb.”
