Britney Spears and her new memoir The Woman In Me are setting the record straight on some much-discussed celebrity rumours surrounding the singer over the last 25 years.
The title – lifted from the lyrics of her anthem I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman – indicates that she's telling her own side of the story, her own truth from the woman inside her. And we applaud her for recounting these sometimes heartbreaking realities from her side.
She has cast a light on her relationship with Justin Timberlake and its traumatic aftermath, the rationale behind her infamous head shaving and the horrendous impact of her conservatorship – here are the most shocking revelations.
We asked an expert to shed some light on the matter…
The star spoke out about her the aftermath of her relationship with Justin Timberlake, pointing out that he still doesn't understand the impact it had on her to this day, particularly the public reaction to Cry Me A River, which was a nod to their break up.
“Everyone felt very sorry for him. And it shamed me,” she wrote. "I felt there was no way at the time to tell my side of the story. 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 realised the power he had in shaming me. I don’t think he understands to this day.
“After Cry Me A River came out, anywhere I went, I could get booed. I would go to clubs and I would hear boos. Once I went to a Lakers game with my little sister and one of my brother’s friends, and the whole place, the whole arena, booed me.”
Britney added that Justin broke up with her over text, after three years together, while she was filming her music video for Overprotected. She had to carry on with filming, despite being devastated about the break up.
It was hinted in the music video for Cry Me A River that Britney was unfaithful to Justin Timberlake during their relationship – but it seems that there were two sides to that story.
According to her memoir, Justin cheated with “another celebrity” that Britney didn't name, as they have a family and she didn't want to embarrass them.
In turn, she also confessed that she kissed choreographer Wade Robson on a night out while with Timberlake.
She explained that the impact of her being "eyeballed" and "looked up and down", led to her shaving her head as a way to "act out" and hit back against all the scrutiny she had received for years. It was her breaking point.
Britney has revealed in the memoir that she terminated a pregnancy while in a relationship with Justin Timberlake, at 19 years old, according to People.
“It was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy. I loved Justin so much," she wrote. "I always expected us to have a family together one day," she continued. "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."
"If it had been left up to me alone, 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 agonising things I have ever experienced in my life."
She had a home abortion, to ensure privacy, but after taking the abortion pills she suffered "excruciating cramps" that lasted for hours. Britney describes how Justin simply played guitar as she cried. He didn't take her to hospital.
“I became a robot. But not just a robot – a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilised that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself," Britney wrote in a heartbreaking description of how her conservatorship affected how she behaved, how she felt about her own identity and the life experiences she missed out on.
“The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
She added: “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.
“That was pretty much the beginning and end of my acting career….”
“It felt like I was being deprived of those good secrets of life – those fundamental supposed sins of indulgence and adventure that make us human.
“They wanted to take away that specialness and keep everything as rote as possible. It was death to my creativity as an artist.”
Britney described her attempts to push back against the control her family had over her during her conservatorship. She tried to smuggle a phone in to “try and break free” but was caught out at every turn.
“After being held down on a gurney, I knew they could restrain my body any time they wanted to,” she wrote. “They could’ve tried to kill me, I thought. I started to wonder if they did want to kill me.”
The Woman in Me: Britney Spears is available on Amazon now.
