Jessica Simpson Reveals She Was Addicted To Alcohol and Pills

In her new upcoming memoir, Open Book, Jessica Simpson revealed that she could have died from her addiction to pills and alcohol.

“I was killing myself with all the drinking and pills,” she writes, according to an excerpt in People.

The singer added that she was “pretty [close to] rock-bottom” in 2017, and made the decision to seek treatment to get sober. “Quitting was the easy part,” she explained. “I was mad at that bottle. At how it allowed me to stay complacent and numb.”

The entrepreneur also stated that her dependency on drugs and alcohol was partially brought on by the trauma surrounding childhood sexual abuse, which began at 6 years old.

“It would start with tickling my back and then go into things that were extremely uncomfortable,” she said about sharing a bed with a family friend’s daughter. “For six years, I was abused by this girl during our family’s visits.”

“I was the victim, but somehow, I felt in the wrong,” she wrote, recalling the moment her “mother slapped my father’s arm” and yelled, “I told you something was happening.”

Jessica revealed they “never stayed at my parents’ friends’ house again, but we also didn’t talk about what I had said.”

As she became more successful in the music industry, her emotional baggage only grew.

“On my seventeenth birthday, I flew to New York for meetings with record labels,” she wrote. “I sang ‘Amazing Grace’ for Tommy Mottola at Columbia and he wanted to sign me. And then he said, ‘You gotta lose fifteen pounds.'”

At 118 pounds, she “immediately went on an extremely strict diet, and started taking diet pills, which I would do for the next twenty years.”

Looking back, Jessica says she’s grateful she found help.

“When I finally said I needed help, it was like I was that little girl that found her calling again in life,” she shared. “I found direction and that was to walk straight ahead with no fear.”

Thank you so much for sharing this, Jessica. You’re inspiring countless women going through similar circumstances.