Real Housewives of Orange County star Emily Simpson has been
very busy. She passed two bar exams, welcomed
three kids and helped raise a total of five children along with her husband, Shane. Then,
she landed on one of Bravo's biggest shows. According to a blog post she wrote for Bravo,
Emily's dad left her family when she was just 6 and her younger sister,
Sara, was 3 years old. After watching her husband leave her for another woman,
Emily's mom sank into a deep depression from which she never fully recovered. Emily recalled,
"As a child, my mother cried a lot. She talked a lot about
my father and blamed him for all of her troubles."
With that history in mind, Emily is now deeply grateful that her children have not
suffered the same fate. In a Father's Day tribute to her husband, Shane,
Emily called him the, quote, "best dad possible," writing,
"I grew up without a dad, but my babies […] will only know the unconditional love of a dad."
Raised by their mother, Emily and Sara lived on a 12-acre farm in rural Ohio.
Simpson told the Journal-News,
"All we had was each other. We had each other's backs our whole lives."
"I'm from Middletown, Ohio, originally. We grew up really poor.
I was the kid that was on free lunch program."
While young Emily spent her time running around barefoot, riding horses, catching frogs,
and raising tadpoles, she always dreamed of moving somewhere bigger, telling the outlet,
"When the opportunity to live in California came, I jumped on it."
Even though she's now based on the west coast,
Simpson still makes annual trips back to Ohio. She said,
"I feel more like myself here when I hang out with family and get away
from all of the Orange County hype. I feel I'm not jaded by the opulence of Orange County."
"I feel very appreciative from where I came because it made me who I am today."
Emily has always been drawn to the spotlight, even as early as her teens.
She attended Madison High School before heading off to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
And adding even more to her Midwestern motif, Emily was, of course, a high school cheerleader.
"Yay me!”
As she captioned a snap, she had the, quote, "same big hair" that she does today.
It's unclear whether her daughter Annabelle has any thoughts on following in her mom's
footsteps, but if a picture of her daughter striking a sassy pose is any indication,
working it for the camera is definitely in the family DNA.
Before anyone with a front-facing camera and filter app could call themselves a "model,"
Emily Simpson was the real deal. During the early March 2020 days of the COVID lockdown,
the reality star dug up some of her old modeling headshots, writing on her Instagram Stories,
"Had a dream last night I was 25, so [I] found some photos from my 20s."
Though Emily didn't really specify whether she got any actual gigs during her modeling career,
the Insta trip down memory lane was a fun look back at the 2000s fashion.
According to LinkedIn, it appears Emily's got the brains to back up that bombshell
beauty. She graduated from Miami University in 1998, with a bachelor's degree in education,
then enrolled in the Thomas Jefferson School of
Law from 2003 to 2005. The San Diego law school may not immediately ring a bell,
and in 2019 it lost its staus as an accredited institution, but it was accredited at one time,
so there’s that. We only point this out because Real Housewives of Orange County co-star Shannon
Beador seemed to question the school's validity during an appearance on Watch What Happens Live.
When answering a question about her friendship with Tamra Judge and Kelly Dodd, Shannon said,
"I went to law school when it was accredited, Emily. Just saying."
Taking exception to the swipe at her alma mater,
Emily did what any good reality celeb does and took to Twitter to defend herself. She tweeted:
"The law school I GRADUATED from IS accredited. […] You're
a law school [dropout]. But thanks for playing."
"I felt like she just repeatedly kept going to other people and talking about me behind my back."
The lesson we're seeing here is one lawyer’s “is” is another’s “was” - but it is worth
noting that according to Simpson’s Linkedin, she has worked for two law
firms in her legal career - so her school’s accreditation held up for a time at least.
“Hey, did you go to Hollywood Upstairs Medical school too?”
In a December 2019 tweet, Emily claimed she passed two bar exams on the first try.
And according to LinkedIn, she has, indeed, passed both the California and Utah bar exams.
"I took the California bar in 2005 and I passed it the first time [Tongue click]."
In other news, you might also remember that her husband, Shane,
failed his first time out. After passing the bar, Emily worked full time as an attorney. And as of
October 2019, she has worked as a copyright lawyer in Orange County, according to Bravo.
But since Emily is not currently practicing full time, she's devoted her time to working
with the California Innocence Project, a legal aid organization that advocates for people who
have been wrongfully convicted. Simpson told The Daily Dish that she first became interested
in the organization after watching TV shows and documentaries about wrongful convictions,
and she reached out to the project. She currently volunteers on the board,
where she reviews cases and hopes to plan a fundraiser in the near future.
Real Housewives fans may be surprised to learn that Emily's marriage to Shane Simpson was not
her first trip down the aisle. During an interview with the Daily Dish podcast,
Emily revealed that she had actually gotten married before, when she was 26. Her first
husband was a Marine who was rarely home, and the marriage barely lasted five years. She remembered,
"I was in law school; he was far away, I think he was in Afghanistan, and things like that."
"It's not easy to just walk away from a marriage and to, you know, just be done with it."
According to Emily, the divorce was amicable, and since they had no children or property,
the fresh law school grad executed the filings herself — making Emily one of
her own first clients. She did not reveal her ex's name, and she said she hasn't been able
to locate him through traditional internet searches. He was reportedly a high-ranking
official within the Marine Corps, and Emily claims he's probably still serving. She added,
"If he was killed in action or something, I feel like there would
have been an article when I Googled him." Fast forwarding to her second marriage,
it appears that Emily initially worked with her future hubby, Shane, at a real estate consulting
company for about three years, before they made it official. And yes, he was her boss.
When Andy Cohen asked if their relationship was, quote, "'me-too'-y," Emily confirmed that it was
not and that their interactions were mostly confined to flirtatious Google Chats until
Shane finally asked her out. Or, rather, until he asked her to marry him. Emily explained,
"Prior to getting married, Shane and I did not date."
Apparently, after Shane and his first wife divorced, he and Emily flirted online,
and then one day, out of the blue, he messaged her with,
quote, "Want to get married?" And Emily went for it. She said,
"I'm 32, I want to have kids, he's a good dad […] let's go."
The couple tied the knot a few weeks later. Emily explained that part of
the reason for the speedy nuptials was that out of respect for Shane's
Mormon religion the two would need to be married before making it physical.
"Mormon men make excellent husbands. They make family first,
you don't have to worry about them gambling or drinking, and, hey, they're good in the sack."
It may come as a surprise to fans, but Emily and Shane didn't meet in Orange County. Instead,
it was in Utah. And though the Southern California sunshine has treated her well, Emily has
definitely expressed an interest in returning to the Beehive State. She said in an Ask Me Anything,
"We will move back to Utah eventually. […] I need more land, more space and horses."
And if you don't smell a crossover with Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,
you may want to get your sniffer checked.
"Don't drink, don't swear, treat your body like a temple."
Horses may be a major factor in a possible relocation for Emily, as
evidenced by a 2019 Instagram post, where she wrote:
"Happy throwback Thursday to when life was much simpler. I woke up every morning to
the view of Utah mountains and I rode horses almost every day. I found horseback riding
to be so therapeutic. […] Animals have a way of helping you see your way out of the darkness."
Emily and her husband make no secret of the fact they used a surrogate for their three children
Annabelle, Luke, and Keller. But not everyone is aware that the surrogate was Emily's sister,
Sara, who agreed to help them out not once, but twice. According to a 2016 profile about the
family in the Journal-News, the Simpsons had spent thousands of dollars and were,
quote, "emotionally broke" when Sara visited the couple in Orange County for Thanksgiving in 2011.
It was then that Sara offered to be a surrogate for the struggling couple, telling the outlet,
"[Emily] had gone through all the options.
It was hard to sit back and watch and I was perfectly capable of doing it."
"I did have 5 miscarriages and then I carried twins, a boy and a girl, until
about 4 months. My water broke and then I went into labor."
After a long, heartbreaking journey to grow their family, their daughter Annabelle was
born in February 2013. Two years later, the couple was hoping for another child,
and they once again asked Sara, who refused. But after the Simpsons tried to go through a
surrogate agency, they found the process too difficult, and asked Sara for help again.
This time, she carried their twin boys Luke and Keller, who were born in 2015.
People handle turning 40 in all sorts of different ways. Some get plastic surgery.
Some buy sports cars. And some audition for reality TV shows and turn into celebrities.
"In a town full of blondes, I'm legally brunette."
Such was the case for Emily, who decided that arguing with other women in their 40s in front
of millions of people was how she wanted to spend her fifth decade. She told Page Six,
"When you're in those 40s,
you have the midlife crisis and you're kind of like, 'Sure, I'll do that!'"
"There are days that I love it,
and there are days where I'm like what the hell did I get myself into."
She went on to chronicle her long, difficult audition process for
Real Housewives of Orange County. As she continued to progress to the next level,
her hubby Shane began to have second thoughts. Then, on her birthday,
Emily got the call asking if she wanted to officially become a Housewife. She joked,
"What can someone call and tell me on my birthday next year that would be better than that?"
"Botox is like it's so common it's like getting Taco Bell."
Bucking the stereotype of Real Housewives as living testaments to the miracles of plastic
surgery, Emily opted to get her breast implants removed, along with a reverse tummy tuck in the
Fall of 2020. During an Instagram Q&A she revealed that this was mostly for health reasons, since her
arthritis and joint pain had been getting worse since she'd gotten her silicone implants four
years earlier. She educated herself on Breast Implant Illness and opted to get her implants
completely removed after her doctor informed her that even saline implants had silicone shells.
After the surgery, Emily wasn't shy about showing off her new bod.
After thanking her Instagram followers for all their well wishes in an October
2020 video, she panned the camera a little further south, and said,
"That's my real tatas. No implants anymore."
"Everybody was just commenting on what I looked like and a lot of the comments were negative."
Though Emily is an accomplished attorney and mother, one of the things she's best known
for is dramatically transforming her physique. She lost 15 pounds in 2020, and lost about 10
percent of her body fat, according to an Instagram post from her trainer Paulina Taylor Hefferan.
So how did she do it? Trainer Hefferan revealed that Emily was up at 6 a.m.
three to four days a week for workouts, along with maintaining a strict diet. While she admitted to
drinking a lot of water, Emily says she doesn't count calories and explained on Instagram,
"I just keep staples in my refrigerator at all times: ground turkey, spinach [and] lettuce,
eggs, avocados, tomatoes, shredded carrots, black beans, corn tortillas, salsa."
Sounds like this reality TV mama knows just what
she needs to set herself up for success in everything she does.
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