Britney Spears: ‘It was like being in a horror movie. I felt tortured’
In her memoir, Britney Spears tells a disturbing story of being trapped by fame and family. Claire Cohen and Blanca Schofield tell you what you need to know
As a child she was scared of her father
Spears doesn’t hold back from describing her turbulent upbringing in Kentwood, Louisiana, making her intentions obvious on the first page: “When I was growing up my mother and father fought constantly. He was an alcoholic. I was usually scared in my home,” she writes.
“What made his time at home especially bad was that my mom would argue with him all night long . . . Bryan [Spears’s brother] and I had to suffer the consequences of her rage, which meant not being able to sleep through the night.”
Things don’t get any better: “The stress of having no money was compounded by the chaos of my father’s mood swings. I was particularly scared to get in the car with my dad,” she recalls, adding heartbreakingly: “What I always wanted was a dad who would love me as I was.”
Her mother isn’t blameless
“By 13, I was drinking with my mom and smoking with my friends,” Spears writes of the period after she’d appeared as a child star on The Mickey Mouse Club. Her mother, Lynne, would give her daiquiris, which she nicknamed “toddies”, and White Russians on drives to the beach – memories the pop star recalls as “some of my best times with my mom”.
Spears recalls an incident in which her mother made her drive from a nearby shop back to their house, aged 13 and with her baby sister in the back seat, and the teenager lost control of the wheel, spinning them off the road and into a telephone pole. “My mother jumped out of the car and started yelling – at me for crashing, at cars passing by for help, at the world for letting this happen.”
Everyone underestimated her
Surrounded by older men – “like I was some kind of Lolita fantasy” – Spears began to understand “no one could seem to think of me as both sexy and capable, or talented and hot. If I was sexy, they seemed to think I must be stupid. If I was hot, I couldn’t possibly be talented.”
Writing about her early career, it’s plain that she was a clever, creative force – staying up late the night before recording … Baby One More Time, aged 16, so that her vocal cords would sound tired to give it a more mature feel. And it was she who came up with the idea for the video to be set in a school, complete with uniforms. Yet, Spears adds, she was constantly treated as though she was a threat and “setting a bad example for kids” – despite being a kid herself.
She hated her virginal image
“I’d been having sex since I was 14,” Spears writes, recounting how she lost her virginity to her brother’s 17-year-old friend. When her parents found out, her mother forced her to pick up rubbish on their local streets: “Cleaning up garbage like a prisoner on the highway.”
It meant, Spears says, she never felt comfortable with being portrayed as an “eternal virgin”.
Her ex-boyfriend and fellow Mickey Mouse Club child star Justin Timberlake has come under heavy fire for boasting, after their split, that he and Spears had been sexually active. But in the book she expresses relief.
“Was I mad at being ‘outed’ by him? No. To be honest with you, I liked that Justin said that . . . [it] broke the ice and made it so that I never had to come out myself as a non-virgin.”
They weren’t pop’s perfect couple
Timberlake has reportedly been “concerned” about what his former girlfriend might reveal – and he probably has reason to be. We might remember pop’s perfect couple – all white teeth, blond hair, smiles and double denim outfits – but Spears punches holes in that, claiming that Timberlake repeatedly “slept around” during their three-year relationship from 1999 to 2002 and admitting that she once “made out” with a choreographer in return.
Perhaps the most damning accusation is that Timberlake pressured her into having an abortion when Spears became pregnant aged 19. “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,” she writes. “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.”
Spears recounts the “agonising” pain as she lay on the bathroom floor in their home after taking the abortion pills while Timberlake strummed his guitar. “I kept crying and sobbing until it was all over.”
Months later, he dumped her via text and released Cry Me a River, with a video that seemed to depict Spears cheating on him. In 2021 Timberlake released a statement apologising, writing: “I am deeply sorry for the times in my life where my actions contributed to the problem.”
It may not have landed as well as he hoped. “I don’t think Justin realised the power he had in shaming me,” Spears writes. “I don’t think he understands to this day.”
He hasn’t yet responded to the claims.
Her mental health crisis wasn’t taken seriously
Spears paints a claustrophobic picture of being trapped by fame, the press and her family.
“I now know that I was displaying just about every symptom of peri-natal depression: sadness, anxiety, fatigue,” she writes of having had two sons, now aged 17 and 18, with her backing dancer ex-husband Kevin Federline. “I’ll admit it, I felt that I couldn’t live if things didn’t get better.”
Despite reports that she was an addict, the only drug she took was “Adderall, the amphetamine that’s given to kids for ADHD. Adderall made me high, yes, but what I found far more appealing was that it gave me a few hours of feeling less depressed. It was the only thing that worked for me as an antidepressant.”
She writes unsparingly about being portrayed as a “bad mother” and hounded by the paparazzi: “I was out being chased, like always, by these men waiting for me to do something they could photograph.”
When she shaved her head in February 2007, having been denied access to her young sons, Spears recalls: “Everyone thought it was hilarious . . . nobody seemed to understand that I was simply out of my mind with grief.”
Her father took control
In February 2008 Spears’s father, Jamie, persuaded a court to place her under two conservatorships: one over her person, controlling what she should do day-to-day (she didn’t see her sons without approval for two years, couldn’t choose what she ate and claims she wasn’t allowed to have her IUD removed), and one over her estate. “I found out [he] took a bigger salary than he paid me,” she writes. “I remained shocked that the state of California would let a man like my father – an alcoholic, someone who’d declared bankruptcy, who’d failed in business, who’d terrified me as a little girl – control me after all my accomplishments.”
She thought her family were trying to kill her
The #FreeBritney movement started by fans who suspected the singer was being held against her will was pretty much spot-on. In perhaps the book’s most mind-boggling chapters, Spears recalls several enforced spells in rehab, culminating in a two-month period of being held “against my will” in a Beverly Hills institution and put on lithium in 2019, after she voices an opinion during a rehearsal for the Las Vegas residency she didn’t want to perform (she regularly makes the point that she was supposedly too sick to look after her own affairs, but was well enough to make money for other people).
“It was like being in my very own horror movie,” she writes. “I began to feel like I was being ritually tortured.”
Only once a nurse shows her the #FreeBritney campaign online one day does she begin to regain some of her spark – but it takes another two years for her to call 911 and report her father for conservatorship abuse, and until November 2021 for it to be overturned after 13 years.
In the period since their daughter fought her conservatorship, her parents have expressed that they are “very concerned” for her and “sorry that she is in so much pain”.
There’s no happy ending yet
Is Britney truly free? She writes candidly about enjoying her freedom: jetskiing, walking around her house singing, recording with Elton John, praying and exercising.
“That’s the kind of thing I’m doing now – trying to have fun and trying to be kind to myself, to take things at my own pace,” she says. “And, for the first time in a long time, allowing myself to trust again.”
She won’t be making a musical comeback, she adds: “It’s time for me not to be someone who other people want; it’s time to actually find myself.”
The lasting impression is that the damage done to her will take a long time to reverse.
“My anger has been manifesting itself physically, especially with migraine headaches. When I get them, I don’t want to go to the doctor because being sent to one doctor after another all those years gave me a phobia about them,” Spears writes. “Migraines are just one part of the physical and emotional damage I have now that I’m out of the conservatorship. I don’t think my family understands the real damage they did.”
- The Times
