Jessica Simpson would be first to say she's in a great place: She loves being pregnant and, finally, the eagle-eyed public can give it a rest when it comes to her weight.
Fat chance.
The maker of a never-released exercise tape shot in 2005 starring Simpson has appealed a previous decision in Simpson's favor that required him to pay the singer's legal fees after he took her camp to court for breach of contract.
According to Alex Astilean, however, fuel was added to the fire when Simpson gave an interview to Lucky in which she said that "the decision not to make myself anorexic was actually great for branding." So why does he care what she's saying now, six years later?
Claiming in his appeal that Simpson used "every possible excuse to get out of her endorsement contract with SpeedFit," Astilean's company, he insists that she breached their agreement by reneging on her duties as spokeswoman before he had a chance to re-edit the finished product to her liking (when the suit was first filed, Simpson's camp maintained that the tape wasn't fit to be released).
Astilean tells E! News that he now has a polished finished product, but that Simpson's Lucky interview (excerpts of which were published in early November) was the start of the fall of his company.
"She is commenting in the magazine that gaining weight was good for business and she never wanted to release a video of her being skinny, she wanted to relate to more people, which really [caused a downfall for] the rest of my life," Astilean, whose native tongue is Romanian, says. "My house is in foreclosure and we are going to be homeless, who knows when, because I want to make this country look skinny."
Simpson was paid $500,000, according to Astilean's court filing, and was contracted to get another $500,000 after the video's release.
A source tells E! News that, first of all, Simpson never said that "gaining weight was good for business." Per Lucky, indeed she did not.
"This is an ongoing thing in which she has won every time," the source says. "There is no validity to this."
—Additional reporting by Sharareh Drury