John Mayer was “obsessed with me,” says Jessica Simpson in her new memoir
Mike Rosenthal for PEOPLEOf all the women John Mayer has dated — and there have been quite a few — his relationship with Jessica Simpson may have been the most surprising. But now, in her new memoir Open Book, excerpted in this week’s People magazine, Jessica explains what their relationship was really like.
According to Jessica, the two met in early 2005 at a party, where John told her how much he liked a song she’d written. After she divorced Nick Lachey in late 2005, Jessica dated others, including John, but, she says, he “wanted to have all of me or nothing.”
“Again and again, he told me he was obsessed with me, sexually and emotionally,” she writes.
However, Jessica says, their relationship soon became a source of extreme anxiety for her, so much so that she began drinking heavily.
“I constantly worried that I wasn’t smart enough for him,” she writes. “He was so clever and treated conversation like a friendly competition that he had to win.” In fact, she admits she sometimes asked a friend to check her texts to John for grammar and spelling errors before she’d send them.
Eventually, Jessica broke things off when John made his now-infamous comment about Jessica in a 2010 Playboy interview, calling her “sexual napalm.”
“He thought that was what I wanted to be called,” Jessica says. “I was floored and embarrassed that my grandmother was actually gonna read that. A woman and how they are in bed is not something that is ever talked about. It was shocking.”
“That was it for me,” Jessica says. “I erased his number. He made it easy for me to walk away.”
John has since publicly apologized for the comment, though he and Jessica are no longer in touch.
People‘s cover story on Jessica is out Friday.
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