Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears in review. (Image courtesy: AFP)
Britney Spears says in her highly anticipated new memoir that she had an abortion during her relationship with Justin Timberlake over two decades ago, according to an excerpt released Tuesday. It’s one of several revelations in “The Woman in Me,” out Oct. 24, in which the 41-year-old pop star also opens up about the controversial conservatorship that prevented her from controlling her life and finances for 14 years to take your hand.
“If it had been left to me, I would never have done it,” she writes of the abortion in an excerpt published Tuesday in People magazine. “And yet Justin was so sure he didn’t want to be a father.”
In the book, Britney Spears describes how she met Timberlake when they both appeared on Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club as children.
They later began dating in their late teens and became one of the entertainment industry’s most well-known couples before splitting up in 2002.
According to the memoir, Timberlake “was definitely not happy about the pregnancy. “He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lifetime, we were way too young,” she writes.
She added: “To this day it is one of the most excruciating things I have ever experienced in my life.”
Representatives for Timberlake, now 42 and married to actress Jessica Biel, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. After splitting from Timberlake, Spears had two sons – Sean and Jayden – with her second husband Kevin Federline.
In 2008, after a serious public breakdown, Spears was placed under a unique legal guardianship, largely run by her father, Jamie. At a court appearance in 2021, she told a judge that the conservatorship was preventing her from removing a contraceptive coil – even though she wanted to get pregnant.
“The conservatorships stripped me of my femininity and turned me into a child,” Spears says in another excerpt. She also writes, “I think back now that my father and his associates had control over my body and my money for so long, and it makes me sick.”
Guardianship was abolished in November 2021. Spears became pregnant in 2022, but later revealed that she had suffered a miscarriage.
In August, her third husband, Sam Asghari, said the couple would file for divorce.
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