Extracts from Britney Spears’ tell-all memoir, The Woman in Me have shed light on the purported cruelty she endured during the unique conservatorship she was subjected to from 2008 to 2021, as well as her reported abortion while in a relationship with Justin Timberlake.
“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,” she writes in an excerpt published by People on Tuesday.
“He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.”
“I’m sure people will hate me for this, but I agreed not to have the baby. I don’t know if that was the right decision.”
Britney and Justin dated between 1999 and 2002 when they were in their late teens and early 20s. Justin has not commented on Britney’s account, however, sources previously told Page Six that the singer, 42, was “concerned” about what Britney was going to share.
The excerpt comes shortly before the memoir is set to be released on October 24. Described as “a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope”, fans were ecstatic that the star had been granted the chance to tell her story on her own terms.
The memoir comes nearly two years after the termination of the singer’s 13 year conservatorship, during which the star’s personal life and finances were taken control of by her father and sister Jamie Lynn Spears.
“Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself,” Britney says of the conservatorship in another excerpt of the memoir.
“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 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 … The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time.”
Britney Spears’s father, Jamie Spears, has not commented on the extracts. He has previously defended the conservatorship arrangement, arguing that he was “protecting” his daughter and his grandkids.
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