Britney Spears is finally telling all.
The pop icon released her bombshell memoir “The Woman in Me” Oct. 24. The book spans over four decades of the “Toxic” singer’s life.
The book begins with Spears discussing her faith and love of singing as she grew up in Kentwood, Louisiana, bulwarks amid her father’s alcoholism and her family’s strict values.
Spears found her escape through music, and quickly went from performing in churches and school talent shows to auditioning for, and being accepted by, “The Mickey Mouse Club,” where she met future boyfriend Justin Timberlake.
As an adolescent, Spears went from performing in Off-Broadway plays to working with producer Max Martin in the studio on what would become her first album, “... Baby One More Time.”
From details from her life under her 13-year conservatorship to insight into her relationship with Timberlake and her marriage with Kevin Federline, here are the 11 of the biggest revelations from “The Woman in Me.”
From ‘The Mickey Mouse Club’ to touring
Spears began her career in music starring on Disney’s “The Mickey Mouse Club” in 1993 and 1994 alongside several other future A-list actors and singers.
“Being in the show was boot camp for the entertainment industry: there were extensive dance rehearsals, singing lessons, acting classes, time in the recording studio, and school in between,” she writes.
“The Mouseketeers quickly split into our own cliques, divided by the dressing rooms that we share: Christina Aguilera and I were the younger kids, and we shares a dressing room with another girl, Nikki DeLoach,” she continues. “We looked up to the older kids — Keri Russell, Ryan Gosling, and Tony Lucca, who I thought was so handsome. And quickly I connected with a boy named Justin Timberlake.”
She shares she later kissed Timberlake for the first time at a sleepover during a game of truth or dare.
By the time she was 16, she had become a full-fledged pop star with the release of her hit single, “… Baby One More Time.” She described listening to Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” the night before she recorded the track, and stayed up late so she would show up to the studio tired and her voice would be “fried.”
“It worked,” she says. “When I sang, it came out gravelly in a way that sounded more mature and sexier.”
Spears ended up as an opening act for ‘N Sync, Timberlake’s boy band, in 1998, and kept in touch with him after.
“We met up when I was on tour and started hanging out during the day before shows and then after shows too,” she writes. “Pretty soon I realized that I was head over heels in love with him — so in love with him it was pathetic. When he and I were anywhere in the same vicinity — his mom even says this — we were like magnets.”
On the rising backlash for her image
As her fame grew, Spears says she couldn’t help but notice how talk show hosts treated her differently from her boyfriend.
“I had a hard time being as carefree as he seemed,” she writes. “Everyone kept making strange comments about my breasts, wanting to know whether or not I’d had plastic surgery.”
She says the wave of public criticism, including what she called her “first real taste of a backlash” stemming from her MTV interview where she was asked if she thought she was “corrupting America’s youth,” led her to start taking Prozac, an antidepressant.
Spears also says she thought her 2003 sit-down interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer, which made her cry on air, was “humiliating.” Sawyer, during the interview, held up magazine covers featuring photos of Spears and asked about her "provocative" image.
“I shouldn’t have been forced to speak on national TV, forced to cry in front of this stranger, a woman who was relentlessly going after me with harsh questions after harsh question,” she writes. “Instead, I felt like I had been exploited, set up in front of the whole world. That interview was a breaking point for me internally — a switch had been flipped. I felt something dark come over my body.”
TODAY.com has reached out to Diane Sawyer for comment.
Spears had an abortion while dating Justin Timberlake
Spears dated fellow pop star Justin Timberlake from 1999 to 2002, and the pop icon revealed in the memoir she had an abortion when she became pregnant with Timberlake’s child.
“It was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy. 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,” Spears writes. “But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He says 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,” she added. (Today, Timberlake shares two sons with wife Jessica Biel).
She went on to describe the abortion as “one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life.”
Timberlake did not respond to a request for comment from TODAY.com.
Spears and Timberlake both cheated before breaking up over text
Spears says she knew Timberlake had cheated on her “a couple of times” throughout their relationship.
She specifically referenced photos catching him with a member of girl group All Saints in a car in London, and that one of her dancers told her he had “gestured toward a girl and says, ‘Yeah, man, I hit that last night.’”
“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. My friend was shocked and believed Justin was only saying it because he was high and felt like bragging,” she writes.
“There were rumors about him with various dancers and groupies. I let it all go, but clearly, he’d slept around. It was one of those things where you know but you just don’t say anything,” she continues.
Spears says she had also cheated on Timberlake once with dancer Wade Robson. TODAY.com has gone out to Robson for comment.
“We were out one night and we went to a Spanish bar. We danced and danced. I made out with him that night. I was loyal to Justin for years, only had eyes for him with that one exception, which I admitted to him,” she writes. “That night was chalked up to something that will happen when you’re as young as we were, and Justin and I moved past it and stayed together. I thought we were going to be together forever. I hoped we would be.”
Spears says Timberlake later broke up with her over text, which she says left her “devastated.” She even considered quitting music in the aftermath.
She 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.”
TODAY.com has reached out to Timberlake for comment.
On meeting, marrying and divorcing Kevin Federline
Spears recalled meeting Kevin Federline, Timberlake’s backup dancer who would become her second husband, at a club in Hollywood, California. He’d later join her on tour for her “Onyx Hotel” tour, where she says she proposed to him, though he declined. Then, he asked the question himself not long after.
“We had so much fun together on that tour: he helped keep me distracted from the work, which felt as challenging as it ever had. After the shows, I didn’t have to go back to my hotel room alone,” she writes. “Flying home, we were chatting away, and I asked him to marry me. He says no and then he proposed.”
The couple got married in 2004, and share two children together: Sean Preston, 18, and Jayden, 17.
Spears says that by 2006, one of her attorneys told her Federline was going to “file for divorce no matter what.”
“I was led to believe that it would be better if I did it first so that I wasn’t humiliated. I didn’t want to be embarrassed so in early November 2006, when Jayden was almost two months old, I filed the papers. Kevin and I both asked for full custody of the boys,” she writes.
She says she later found out that because she legally set the divorce in motion, she found out she would have to pay his legal bills, as well as being “held responsible in the press for having broken up my young family” when the divorce was finalized in 2007.
“So I was young, and I made a lot of mistakes. But I will say this: I wasn’t manipulative. I was just stupid. That’s one thing Justin and Kevin ruined about me. I used to trust people. But after the breakup with Justin and then my divorce, I never really did trust people again,” she writes.
TODAY.com has reached out to Federline for comment.
Inside her decision to shave her hair
Spears was photographed shaving her head in 2007. In the memoir, she explains that the gesture was supposed to send a strong message.
“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 learned the conservatorship papers had been filed while in the hospital
Spears writes that she learned a judge ordered her to be under a conservatorship while she was in the hospital for an evaluation in 2008.
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.”
TODAY.com has reached out to Wallet and Spears for comment.
She wasn’t allowed to get her IUD removed while under the conservatorship
Under the conservatorship, Spears says nearly every aspect of her life was under control: even her reproductive decisions as she met the man who became her third husband, Hesam “Sam” Asghari.
“Everything began to seem possible. Hesam and I became so close that we started to talk about having a baby together. But I was in my thirties, and I knew that time was running out,” Spears writes.
“And yet my father wouldn’t let me go to the doctor when I asked for an appointment to get my IUD removed,” she says.
Once the conservatorship ended, Spears writes she did become pregnant with Asghari, though the pregnancy ended in a miscarriage during her first trimester.
“I was devastated to have lost the baby,” she writes. “Once again though, I used music to help me gain insight and perspective.”
She had little control over her diet and finances during the conservatorship
Spears recalls several instances of her father and other members of her team controlling her diet and her finances over the course of her 13-year 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.
Spears 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.”
She shares that on one of the only nights she ever went out to dinner, she took friend and her dancers out to show them how much she appreciated them. She tried to pick up the $1,000 check, and her card was declined.
“I didn’t have enough money in my ‘allowance’ account to cover it,” she writes.
On being ‘finally free’ when the conservatorship was terminated
Spears says she began to start advocating for her conservatorship to end when she saw #FreeBritney supporters 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 in California to report her father for conservatorship abuse, and one day later she gave a rare public testimony before the court asking for the conservatorship to be terminated.
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, a lawyer she chose to represent herself, 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.”
She’s not interested in pursuing music right now
As for the future, 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.”
Spears says she now suffers from migraine headaches, which she described as “one part of the physical and emotional damage I have now that I’m out of the conservatorship.”
The singer says she’s relearning how to live her life on her own terms, and enjoy being present in her own life, power and womanhood again.
“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.
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