Kristin Cavallari Details Her Brief Relationship With Nick Lachey

Kristin Cavallari is opening up about her “wild time” dating Nick Lachey following his divorce from Jessica Simpson. The Laguna Beach alum, now 37, offered rare comments about the brief romance during the Nov. 25 episode of her Let’s Be Honest podcast, recalling that she was either 18 or 19 years old when she dated the former 98 Degrees frontman, who was 33 at the time.

“It was wild. It was a lot,” she recalled. “He had just gotten a divorce from Jessica Simpson. So this was like the biggest thing in 2000 … [it] must have been like 2006. And it was a wild ride.”

Lachey and Simpson, now 44, were married from 2002 to 2006, chronicling the early days of their marriage on MTV’s Newlyweds reality show. Following Simpson and Lachey’s split, Cavallari’s brief dalliance with the boy bander, now 51, earned plenty of attention.

“I had so many paparazzi following my every move, waiting outside my house,” Cavallari recalled on her podcast. “And that was the first time I experienced that.” The Hills star also found herself being compared to Simpson at every turn, even when it came to “stealing” the singer’s poses on the red carpet.

“Stealing her red carpet poses? There’s like four f—king poses you can do on the red carpet,” Cavallari protested. “Like, my hand on my hip? You think I’m stealing her poses? Like, what?”

The MTV alum continued that it was during her relationship with Lachey that she “really started to kind of lose trust in some people,” sharing a story of a former friend who sold a photo of her to a magazine. “That was my introduction to just shadiness,” Cavallari admitted of the “f–ked up” betrayal.

Cavallari and Lachey broke up after just a short time dating, but have both remained friendly. In 2013, Cavallari married Jay Cutler after three years of dating, and the two would go on to welcome sons Camden, 12, and Jaxon, 10, and daughter Saylor, 8, before splitting in April 2020. Lachey, meanwhile, married wife Vanessa Lachey in 2011, and the two now share sons Camden, 11, and Phoenix, 7, and daughter Brooklyn, 9.

Meanwhile, Simpson married NFL player Eric Johnson in July 2014, and the couple now shares daughter Maxwell, 12, son Ace, 11, and daughter Birdie, 5. The pair have recently sparked breakup rumors, with both Simpson and Johnson being spotted without their wedding rings, but neither have officially clarified their relationship status.