Long before wedding bells rang for either of them, Jessica Simpson once joked about marrying NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt Jr. in a dream.
During a candid conversation about the early days of her relationship with the sports legend, Amy Earnhardt joked that the pop star “tried to fish my man.”
“It’s 2008, maybe [2009]. We had just started dating, and I think I’m still living in Jacksonville, but I come up to Daytona to hang out with Dale. And I hear that Jessica Simpson’s at the racetrack. We’re the same age. We both came from Texas, so I’ve always kind of been a fan of hers,” Amy recalled on her “Bless Your ‘Hardt” podcast.
At the time, she said she was excited about the possibility of meeting the “I Wanna Love You Forever” singer.
“And I’m like, ‘Hey, Dale, do you think that you could get Jessica Simpson to come to the bus so I could meet her?’ And he’s like, ‘I don’t think that’d be a really good idea.’ And I was like, ‘Why not?’”
“And he shows me this clip … of her doing an interview earlier that day, how she had had a dream that she and Dale Jr. got married in a treehouse.”
Amy then drew the line.
“And I’m like, ‘Yeah… don’t bring that b—- over here. It’s a good idea,” Amy joked as Dale laughed.
She added that the moment left a lasting impression.
“I haven’t bought a Jessica Simpson shoe or a bag — you know, how she’s got all the things — ever since then. I was like, she was f—ing trying to fish my man … Yes, she was. She knew exactly what she was doing.”
The alleged near run-in happened in the late 2000s, when Amy and Dale Jr. were just starting their relationship and Simpson was rising to pop stardom.
Simpson later met former NFL player Eric Johnson in May 2010. The two got engaged six months later and married in 2014 after welcoming their first two children, Maxwell and Ace. They welcomed daughter Birdie in 2019.
In November 2024, Johnson was spotted without his wedding ring as Simpson focused on a music comeback.
“She’s working on music and splits her time between Los Angeles and Nashville. Eric spends all of his time in LA, where the kids go to school,” a source told People at the time.
“Jess and Eric very much live separate lives.”
Meanwhile, Dale Jr. and Amy tied the knot in 2016 and now share two daughters, Isla, 7, and Nicole, 5.
