The pop icon released her bombshell memoir “The Woman in Me” Oct. 24. The book is packed with a series of shocking revelations reflecting on over four decades of the singer’s life.
The singer, now 41, talks about her romantic relationships, family problems, failed marriages, mental health battles, and of course the conservatorship.
Spears’ memoir is available for purchase now, but if you’re looking for a cheat sheet, we’ve compiled the most shocking stories from The Woman in Me.
1. Justin encouraged Britney to get an abortion
In Spears’ memoir, she shares that Timberlake allegedly pressured her into getting an abortion while they were together in late 2000.
She explained that the reason she did not go through with the pregnancy was because N*Sync star Justin ‘wasn’t ready’ for the responsibilities of parenthood as the pair were only 19 at the time.
“It was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy,” she writes. “I loved Justin so much. I always expected us to have a family together one day. This would just be much earlier than I’d anticipated. But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.”
Spears said she didn’t personally want to have an abortion at the time. “If it had been left up to me alone,” she explains, “I never would have done it. And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father…To this day, it’s one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life.”
Britney explains how she was left ‘crying and sobbing’ all alone after choosing to undergo the procedure at home in a desperate bid to keep the abortion completely secret from the public and her own family.
“It was important that no one find out about the pregnancy or the abortion, which meant doing everything at home. Spears says she used the abortion pill, then “went into the bathroom and stayed there for hours, lying on the floor, sobbing and screaming.”
Then, Timberlake apparently decided to soothe Spears by performing for her.
“At some point, he thought maybe music would help, so he got his guitar and he lay there with me, strumming it,” Spears notes.
“The experience messed me up for a while, especially because I still did love Justin so much. It was insane how much I loved him, and for me, it was unfortunate.”
Britney would later welcome sons Sean Preston, 18, and Jayden, 17 with Kevin Federline.
And Timberlake, who also has two children with his wife, actress Jessica Biel, has not publicly commented on Spears’ story.
2. Spears and Timberlake both cheated before breaking up over text
Up until now, the agreed upon explanation for the couples split was that spears cheated on Timberlake. And the theory was endorsed by Timberlakes’s famous music video’ Cry Me A River.’
But in her book spears revealed that, It was Timberlake who cheated throughout their relationship, she says.
“There were a couple of times during our relationship when I knew Justin had cheated on me,” Spears writes. “Because I was so infatuated and so in love, I let it go, even though the tabloids seemed determined to rub my face in it. When NSYNC went to London in 2000, photographers caught him with one of the girls from All Saints in a car. But I never said anything. At the time we’d only been together for a year.”
Spears listed another alleged affair of Timberlake’s, which came to light after he outed himself to one of her dancers. “We were in Vegas, and one of my dancers who’d been hanging out with him told me he’d gestured toward a girl and said, ‘Yeah, man, I hit that last night,’” Spears recalls. “I don’t want to say who he was talking about, because she’s actually very popular and she’s married with kids now. I don’t want her to feel bad.”
According to Spears, these incidents happened frequently but she decided to ignore them. she says. “It was one of those things where you know but you just don’t say anything.”
Britney also confirms in her memoir that she cheated on Timberlake at the very end of their relationship, with a choreographer named Wade Robson. She said that she has kissed him during a night out.
“[Wade and I] were out one night and we went to a Spanish bar,” she says. “We danced and danced. I made out with him that night.”
Spears writes of the moment she saw Timberlake’s video for his hit song “Cry Me a River,” which she described as “a woman who looks like me cheats on him and he wanders around sad in the rain.”
“I felt there was no way at the time to tell my side of the story,” she writes of sharing that they had both cheated. “I couldn’t explain, because I knew no one would take my side once Justin had convinced the world of his version. I don’t think Justin realized the power he had in shaming me. I don’t think he understands to this day.”
She writes that while she thought the media portrayed her as a “harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy,” she was actually “comatose in Louisiana, and he was happily running around Hollywood.”
3. Timberlake broke up with Spears with a two-word text
Britney revealed that she was devastated when Justin Timberlake broke up with her through text message. (a two-word text message. And a lot of exclamation points).
To be specific, Timberlake texted Spears, “It’s over!!!”
Spears was on set filming a music video for her song Overprotected when she received the text message.
The director for the music video, Chris Applebaum, confirmed to Page Six earlier this year that he saw the text message with his own eyes.
According to Applebaum, Spears disappeared from set at some point late in the day, he later found her in her trailer, crying, which is when she showed him the text message from Timberlake.
Applebaum said to Spears, “If you don’t have it in you, I totally understand. But if you want to go out there and finish this last set-up in the rain, you can show [Timberlake] that he just made the biggest f—ing mistake of his life.”
So Spears went out and finished the work day.
She wrote, “As much as Justin hurt me, there was a huge foundation of love, and when he left me, I was devastated,”
“When I say devastated, I mean I could barely speak for months. Whenever anyone asked me about him, all I could I do is cry. I don’t know if I was clinically in shock, but it felt that way.”
4. Inside her decision to shave her hair during infamous 2007 meltdown
In the memoir, she explains that the gesture of shaving her hair in 2007 was supposed to send a strong message. As she was in the midst of going through a painful divorce with Kevin Federline and was constantly in the public eye.
“My long hair was a big part of what people liked — I knew that. I knew a lot of guys thought long hair was hot. Shaving my head was a way of saying to the world: F— you. You want me to be pretty for you? F— you. You want me to be good for you? F— you. You want me to be your dream girl? F— you. I’d smiled politely while TV show hosts leered at my breasts, while American parents says I was destroying their children by wearing a crop top, while executives patted my hand condescendingly and second-guessed my career choices even though I’d sold millions of records, while my family acted like I was evil. And I was tired of it,” she writes.
She also added: ‘I’d been eyeballed so much growing up. I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager.
‘Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back.’
As a result, a year later she was put under a court-ordered conservatorship in 2008, which granted her father Jamie Spears and a lawyer total control over her financial and personal affairs.
5. She learned about the conservatorship papers while in the hospital
While she was in the hospital for an evaluation in 2008, Spears learned that a judge had put her under a conservatorship.
Her father Jamie Spears was appointed to be her co-conservator, along with a lawyer, Andrew Wallet.
“Even though I begged the court to appoint literally anyone else — and I mean, anyone off the street would have been better — my father was given the job, the same man who’d make me cry if I had to get in the car with him when I was a little girl,” she writes. “And the court told me I was demented, and I wasn’t even allowed to pick my own lawyer.”
She writes that Wallet was paid a salary of $426,000 per year for managing her estate, plus she says she paid upwards of $500,000 for her court-appointed lawyer, who she didn’t learn she could replace for over a decade.
Soon after the conservatorship was in place, Spears writes her father moved items into her office space in her home.
“My father shoved aside my bowl of receipts, setting his things up on the bar. ‘I just want to let you know,’ he says, ‘I call the shots. You sit right there in that chair and I’ll tell you what goes on,’” she recalled. “I looked at him with a growing sense of horror. ‘I’m Britney Spears now,’ he says.”
6. the 13-year conservatorship made her feel like a ‘child robot’
Britney also went into details talking about that 13-year conservatorship as she detailed how her father ‘controlled her body and her money’ and ‘hurt’ her with ‘fat’ jibes.
‘I became a robot. But not just a robot — a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself.’
Spears also recalls several instances of her father and other members of her team controlling her diet over the course of the conservatorship.
“No matter how hard I dieted and exercised, my father was always telling me I was fat,” she writes. “He put me on a strict diet.”
She says she would plead with their butler to sneak her “real food,” like a hamburger or ice cream. She says the butler replied that he couldn’t due to “strict orders” from her father.
“So for two years, I ate almost nothing but chicken and canned vegetables,” she says.
She also recalls how her father controlled all her fianances.
She says she was given an allowance of $2,000 a week, and that any of her purchases, even something as small as sneakers, could be declined by her conservators.
“This was despite the fact that I did 248 shows and sold more than 900,000 tickets in Vegas,” she writes. “Each show paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
The star concluded: ‘Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself. I think back now on my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for that long and it makes me feel sick…
‘I didn’t deserve what my family did to me.’
7. britney’s mother got her into drinking very young
Spears shares that she developped a relationship with alcohol when she was only in middle school, due to her parents drinking habits.
“For fun, starting when I was in eighth grade, my mom [Lynne] and I would make the two-hour drive from Kentwood to Biloxi, Mississippi,” Spears writes, “and while we were there, we would drink daiquiris. We called our cocktails ‘toddies.’ I loved that I was able to drink with my mom every now and then. The way we drank was nothing like how my father [Jamie] did it.”
Spears described her father’s personality, while he was drinking, as “more depressed and shut down.” It was a stark difference compared to how Spears felt when she drank with her mother. “We became happier, more alive and adventurous,” she says.
Neither Jamie nor Lynne Spears have yet responded publicly to this story.
8. Britney gave up her ‘freedom’ so she could see her sons during conservatorship
In her book, the singer alleged that she went along with the terms of her now-terminated conservatorship in order to spend time with her boys.
Ex-husband Kevin Federline was given sole legal and physical custody of their sons in 2008 after Spears was hospitalized after she locked herself in a bathroom with her sons and refused to turn them over to Federline.
‘My freedom in exchange for naps with my children — it was a trade I was willing to make,’ she wrote.
She added: ‘Starting a family was my dream come true. Being a mom was my dream come true.’
9. On being ‘finally free’ when the conservatorship was ended
Spears revealed that it was her supporters who were the reason she began fighting her conservatorship, after she saw #FreeBritney on a talk show while she was in a mental health facility.
On the night of June 22, 2021, she called 911 from her home to report her father for conservatorship abuse, and one day later she made a public testimony to the court asking to terminate the conservatorship.
She describes how she felt when her father was removed as her conservator in September.
“I felt relief sweep over me. The man who had scared me as a child and ruled over me as an adult, who had done more than anyone to undermine my self-confidence, was no longer in control of my life,” she writes.
She was on vacation in Tahiti in November when she got a call from her attorney Mathew Rosengart, that she was no longer under the conservatorship.
“He’d told me when I left for the trip that one day soon I’d be able to wake up for the first time in 13 years a free woman,” she recalls. “Still, I couldn’t believe it when he called me as soon as he came out of the court hearing and told me it was done. I was free.”
10. Britney is not interested in pursuing music in the near futur
So what will she do next after breaking free of her conservatorship and published this memoir ?
“I keep getting asked when I’m going to put on shows again. I confess that I’m struggling with that question. I’m enjoying dancing and singing the way I used to when I was younger and not trying to do it for my family’s benefit, not trying to get something, but doing it for me and for my genuine love for it,” she writes.
As for her performing career, Spears says music will not be her main focus.
“Pushing forward in my music career is not my focus at the moment. Right now it’s time for me to try to get my spiritual life in order, to pay attention to the little things, to slow down. It’s time for me not to be someone who other people want; it’s time to actually find myself,” she writes.
She adds, “Being an entertainer was great, but over the past five years my passion to entertain in front of a live audience has lessened.”
