LOS ANGELES – Britney Spears says in her eagerly anticipated new memoir that she had an abortion during her relationship with American singer-actor Justin Timberlake over two decades ago, according to an excerpt released on Tuesday.
It is one of several revelations in The Woman In Me, out on Oct 24, in which the 41-year-old American pop star also addresses the controversial conservatorship that barred her from handling her own life and finances for 14 years.
“If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it,” she writes of the abortion, in an excerpt published by People magazine on Tuesday.
“And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father.”
In the book, Spears describes meeting Timberlake when they were both children performing in Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club.
They began dating in their late teens, becoming one of the entertainment industry’s highest-profile couples, before splitting in 2002.
According to the memoir, Timberlake “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,” she writes.
“To this day, it’s one of the most agonising things I have ever experienced in my life.”
Representatives for Timberlake, now 42 and married to American actress Jessica Biel, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. They have two sons aged eight and three.
Following the split with Timberlake, Spears had two sons – Sean, 18, and Jayden, 17 – with her second husband Kevin Federline.
In 2008, after suffering a highly public breakdown, she was placed under a unique legal guardianship largely governed by her father, Jamie.
During a court appearance in 2021, she told a judge that the conservatorship was preventing her from removing a contraceptive IUD – despite her wanting to get pregnant.
“The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child,” writes Spears in another excerpt.
“I think back now on my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for that long and it makes me feel sick.”
The guardianship was scrapped in November 2021. Spears, who married her long-time boyfriend Sam Asghari in 2022, became pregnant that same year, but later announced she had suffered a miscarriage.
In August 2023, Asghari announced they were divorcing. AFP
