“When Justin started making his first solo album, Justified, he began being very standoffish with me. I feel that was as a result of he’d determined to make use of me as ammunition for his document, and so it made it awkward for him to be round me watching him with all that affection and devotion.”
She noticed the breakup message whereas filming the music video for the “Overprotected” remix by Darkchild, then went again to work. “I had to return out and dance.”
“For as a lot as Justin harm me, there was an enormous basis of affection, and when he left me, I used to be devastated,” she writes. “Once I say devastated, I imply I may barely communicate for months. At any time when anybody requested me about him, all I may do was cry. I don’t know if I used to be clinically in shock, however it felt that method.”
She writes that Timberlake’s household had been “the one actual, loving household I had.” Elsewhere within the guide, she mentions Timberlake’s mom, Lynn Harless, loaning her and her mom cash to fly house for Spears’s grandmother’s funeral through the Mickey Mouse Membership days. “It was one thing household would do, and the youngsters and fogeys on that present grew to become household.”
“I used to be shattered,” she writes of her post-breakup state. In the meantime, Timberlake launched a video for “Cry Me a River” with a Britney lookalike skulking round and dishonest on him, and performed a tune referred to as “Don’t Go (Horrible Lady),” which Spears writes “appeared to be about me” for Barbara Walters on 20/20.
She was booed each time she went out, she mentioned, framed as “a harlot.” On the similar time, Timberlake’s album soared.
“The considered my betraying him gave the album extra angst, gave it a function: shit-talking an untrue girl. The hip-hop world of that period beloved a storyline with the theme ‘Fuck you, bitch!’ Getting revenge on ladies for perceived disrespect was all the craze on the time. Eminem’s violent revenge tune ‘Kim’ was large. The one downside with the narrative was that, in our case, it wasn’t like that,” she writes.
“‘Cry Me a River’ did very nicely. Everybody felt very sorry for him. And it shamed me.”
“I felt there was no method on the time to inform my aspect of the story,” Spears continues. “I couldn’t clarify, as a result of I knew nobody would take my aspect as soon as Justin had satisfied the world of his model.”
“I don’t suppose Justin realized the facility he had in shaming me. I don’t suppose he understands to this present day.”
In 2021, after a documentary about Spears aired and Timberlake was criticized for a way he spoke about their intercourse life, he posted an apology on Instagram acknowledging the misogyny of the music trade and writing, “I perceive that I fell quick in these moments and in lots of others.”
Although she says now that she “didn’t deal with issues nicely” within the aftermath of the abortion and eventual cut up, Spears writes that the connection precipitated ripples via her life.
“Justin framed our time along with me because the unhealthy man, and I believed it, so ever since then, I’ve felt like I’m underneath a kind of curse.”
Self-importance Honest has reached out to representatives for Spears and Timberlake for remark.
