Britney Spears’ memoir has a ton of bombshells, based just on the revelations teased so far leading up to its Tuesday release.
The 41-year-old pop icon’s “The Woman in Me” is available starting Tuesday, but plenty of details have leaked out. Spears, according to reports and a rare interview, will peel back the curtain on everything from her relationship with Justin Timberlake, her nearly decade-long conservatorship, and infamous moments that played out in the media, including the head-shaving of 2007.
Here are some of the secrets Spears has finally laid bare for all to read.
All about her relationship with Justin Timberlake
Among the most viral of Spears’ memoir-related headlines this week have been those dealing with the *NSYNC singer, 42, whom she dated from 1999 to 2002.
Spears got an abortion during her time with Timberlake
Spears believed Timberlake could spell out happily ever after for her, even after she got pregnant. But apparently they were on different pages. Though Timberlake was certain he was’t ready to be a father, Spears’ conservative upbringing left her “conflicted.” She ultimately had an abortion.
Cheating goes around
Timberlake cheated on Spears — and then, true to his lyrics, she did the same.
Much like “What Goes Around…/…Comes Around,” Timberlake cheated on Spears with an unnamed celebrity . Amid rumors of his infidelity, Spears says she returned the favor.
She confessed to the “one exception” — having “danced and danced” and then “made out” with choreographer Wade Robson, who’d worked with both stars, in 2000. She says she was faithful to Timberlake for the rest of their romance.
The end
Timberlake not only called it quits with Spears via text — a novelty in the early aughts — but the breakup left her so “devastated” Spears felt she “was clinically in shock” and “could barely speak for months. Whenever anyone asked me about him, all I could do was cry.”
The aftermath — including Diane Sawyer
Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” music video didn’t help matters, as it sees “a woman who looks like me cheat[ing] on him and he wanders around sad in the rain.”
While the public viewed Spears as a “harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy,” the singer says she “was comatose in Louisiana, and he was happily running around Hollywood.”
Spears also recalled feeling “exploited” in her 2003 interview with Diane Sawyer, who asked what she’d done to leave the “SexyBack” singer in “so much pain.”
“I felt … set up in front of the whole world,” Spears wrote.
Details about the conservatorship
Spears traded her free-will to get time with her kids
Spears’ conservatorship, which started after her divorce from Federline and two hospitalizations for involuntary psychological evaluations, lasted nearly 13 years until it was terminated in November 2021.
“After being held down on a gurney,” Spears wrote, “I knew they could restrain my body any time they wanted to.”
She “went along with it … in exchange for naps with my children — it was a trade I was willing to make.”
The “Mickey Mouse Club” alum mocked the idea she was “too sick to choose my own boyfriend and yet somehow healthy enough to appear on sitcoms and morning shows, and to perform for thousands of people.”
Dad Jamie “gaslit” her
Spears recalled dad and conservator Jamie convincing her to enter into “luxury” rehab — where her course of Prozac was stopped and replaced with lithium.
“My father said that if I didn’t go, then I’d have to go to court, and I’d be embarrassed. … I felt like it was a form of blackmail and I was being gaslit,” the singer recalled.
Spears said that a few months of “confinement” made her fear for her life and forced her “to believe that my little heart, whatever made me Britney, was no longer inside my body anymore.”
However, the incident — and the help of a nurse who exposed her to the #FreeBritney movement — helped kickstart the eventual end of the conservatorship.
Spears could have healed herself
Despite her split from Federline and the loss of custody over sons Sean and Jayden, Spears remains confident she would have eventually rebuilt her life without other people running it.
“I know I would’ve followed my heart and come out of this the right way and worked it out,” she said, noting she feels “sick” knowing she instead spent more than a decade “feeling like a shadow of myself.”
Correcting the narrative
Spears’ memoir also wants to correct the record on some other issues:
Mental health
Spears began taking the antidepressant Prozac to cope with the criticism and objectification she faced in the earlier days of stardom, especially compared to male counterparts like Timberlake.
Partying
Though pictures of Spears in a car with Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan long made the trio symbols of celebrity partying scene of the aughts, Spears insisted those days were “never as wild as the press made it out to be.”
She “never had a drinking problem” but did regard Adderall, used to treat ADHD, as her “drug of choice,” less for the high than the “far more appealing” aspect of affording her “a few hours of feeling less depressed.”
Head-shaving
Everyone who lived through 2007 saw photos of Spears’ freshly shaven head, followed by images of her attacking a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella. Spears says she was thinking a bit “like a child” in those moments, but that it was a direct response to grappling with “severe postpartum depression, abandonment by my husband, the torture of being separated from my two babies, the death of my adored aunt Sandra, and the constant drumbeat of pressure from paparazzi.”
The docs
Spears previously slammed the “trash” docs that came out about her in 2021 — FX’s “Framing Britney Spears” and “Controlling Britney Spears” as well as Netflix’s “Britney vs. Spears.” In the book, she gets more nuanced.
“I understand that everyone’s heart was in the right place, but I was hurt that some old friend spoke to filmmakers without consulting me first,” she said. “There was so much guessing about what I must have thought or felt.”
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