Gabby Windey, Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson Amy Sussman/Getty Images; Marc Andrew Deley/FilmMagic
Gabby Windey never misses a chance for a good pop culture reference.
While revealing her marriage to Robby Hoffman on Wednesday, March 5, the 34-year-old former Bachelorette compared her decision to tie the knot amid the Los Angeles wildfires to Jessica Simpson reuniting with Nick Lachey after the September 11 attacks in 2001.
“We had just evacuated from the fires. Literally cue Rihanna, ‘We found love in a hopeless place,’” Windey told Cosmo. “What better time to get married than right now? Because if the world is ending, we want to be with each other.”
While debating where to evacuate in January, Windey had reached out to hotels in Las Vegas. She and Hoffman, who started dating in summer 2023, were married in Sin City just two days later.
“It looked like a wedding suite. Gabby turned to me and she went, ‘Should we get married?’ And look: I’ve been proposing since the day I met her,” Hoffman, 35, said in Wednesday’s profile. “We got to this room and it’s like out of a mafia movie, 12-foot ceilings, a separate bedroom from the living room, that type of hotel. And we were like, ‘Whoa.’ And then Gabby floated getting married.”
Windey acknowledged that the twosome were “really living in fear” as the fires approached their home, but when “something feels right, it just feels right.”
“It’s giving Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey when they divorced and came back together after 9/11,” she said. “They were like, ‘No, actually, we do want to be together because the world is ending.’ It was just us two. We did everything in two days. We were just going to show up to a chapel, but then I said, ‘Oh, no. If it’s OK, I actually want you to ask me.’”
Back in 2001, Lachey and Simpson had recently called it quits when he was at Newark Airport on the day of the terrorist attacks. The 98 Degrees singer called his ex from the airport and she decided she wanted to get back together.
“After 9/11, I knew that I never ever wanted to be away from Nick ever for the rest of my life,” Simpson recalled in her 2020 memoir, Open Book. ”It felt indecent that God had put this love in my life, and I had the audacity to take it for granted when so many people had just lost who they loved the most.”
Lachey proposed in Hawaii in February 2002, and the pair wed that October.
As many Newlyweds historians know, Simpson and Lachey split in 2005 and finalized their divorce in 2006. While she went on to marry Eric Johnson and welcome three kids, news broke earlier this year that the pair were separated.
“Eric and I have been living separately navigating a painful situation in our marriage,” Simpson told Us Weekly in a statement in January. “Our children come first, and we are focusing on what is best for them. We are grateful for all of the love and support that has been coming our way, and appreciate privacy right now as we work through this as a family.”
Lachey, meanwhile, married Vanessa Lachey (née Minnillo) and welcomed three kids of his own.
