Britney Spears in her own words: The star finally has her say in The Woman In Me
For all the noise that has surrounded Britney Spears, little has ever come from the star herself.
Ever since Baby One More Time announced her arrival as a superstar at the age of 16, Spears has made headlines: her appearance, her sex life, her break-ups, her breakdown – every movement scrutinised, analysed, objectified, criticised.
Paparazzi photographers followed her like an “army of zombies” and for 13 years she lived under a conservatorship that controlled her life.
She was one of the biggest stars on the planet but could not make her own choices – from trainers to boyfriends, it was all vetted.
Pic: Simon & Schuster
Now, after being freed from her conservatorship following much-publicised legal proceedings in 2021 – and the #FreeBritney campaign from fans – Spears is telling her story in her own words, in the memoir The Woman In Me.
The title is significant, referencing a lyric from the song Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman, released earlyish in her career from her third album, Britney, in 2002: “I’m not a girl, don’t tell me what to believe… I’m just tryin’ to find the woman in me.”
Spears was just 20 when the song was released. Sexualised from a young age, at the same time shamed and criticised about her womanhood, she could not win. As she puts it: “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.”
And then, after she became a mother – all she had ever wanted – she was placed under the conservatorship, with her father Jamie and others in charge. Under this legal arrangement, she became “a sort of child-robot”, she says. “I had been so infantilised that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself… the conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child.”
The Woman In Me is a short memoir, less than 300 pages. Spears’s storytelling is straightforward, addressing aspects of her life, good and bad, matter-of-factly before moving on to the next. She doesn’t need to embellish – the facts are emotive enough.
Pic: From the documentary Framing Britney Spears/ Sky Documentaries
‘There is so much freedom in being anonymous’
The star begins with her early life growing up in Kentwood, Louisiana, detailing a somewhat difficult childhood due to her parents fighting and father Jamie’s drinking. She was drinking and smoking by the age of 13, she says, and started driving at that age, too.
As she details her rise to fame, it is clear how underestimated she was from the start. As many who were involved in her career and the Baby One More Time video have previously said, the idea for the bored schoolgirl and her classmates dancing in the corridors – a huge part of the song’s success – was all hers.
Back then, she “had nothing to lose”, she says. “There is so much freedom in being anonymous.”
Once that song was out in the world, her life, her freedom, would never be the same again.
Read more:
Ten revelations from The Woman In Me
The key claims made in star’s 2021 court speech
Pic: AP/Chris Gardner
Spears goes on to describe her relationship with fellow Mickey Mouse club protege Justin Timberlake, describing their romance and claiming he cheated on her, but says she “let it all go”, eventually also cheating on him. Perhaps the biggest revelation from the book, that she had an abortion during their relationship, was previewed before its release. To Spears, the pregnancy wasn’t a “tragedy”, she says, but Timberlake said they weren’t ready.
When they broke up in 2002 they were a couple barely out of their teens – a difficult time in anyone’s life, let alone under the glare of paparazzi flashes and tabloid headlines. He dumped her by text message, she says. She details her hurt, but also defends Timberlake about another aspect of their break-up that he has since been publicly criticised for – admitting to an interviewer that they had slept together, despite her being marketed as “an eternal virgin”.
Timberlake is yet to comment on Spears’s memoir, but has previously apologised for his comments on their sex life. But the star says of this: “Was I mad at being ‘outed’ by him as sexually active? No. To be honest with you, I liked that Justin said that. Why did my managers work so hard to claim I was some kind of young-girl virgin even into my 20s. Whose business was it if I’d had sex or not?”
Spears says she started to increasingly suffer anxiety as she made headlines whatever she did. What happened in the years that followed has been well-documented: her 55-hour Las Vegas marriage to childhood friend Jason Alexander; her marriage to dancer Keven Federline later that year and the subsequent birth of her two sons, and then the struggles she faced after their split amid a custody battle. She suffered perinatal depression, she says, as her “vulnerable” babies were placed in “the world of jockeying paparazzi and tabloids”.
When it became too much, she famously shaved her head. This was her “f*** you” to the world, to everyone who wanted her to be the beautiful good girl, the pop princess puppet.
Not long after this, plans for the conservatorship were put in place.
#FreeBritney: ‘I’ve been through too much’
Spears says she started attempts to free herself from the legal arrangement in 2014. Hearings took place in private, but as the #FreeBritney movement grew and a documentary was released about it early in 2021, the world became aware that something wasn’t right. Then, in June 2021, Spears finally had her say in open court, giving a four-page statement over 20 minutes, telling the judge: “I want my life back.”
Five months later, the order was lifted. Since then, Spears has gone through a miscarriage, married and subsequently split from Sam Asghari. Fans now hear from her through her Instagram page, on which she shares dancing videos and often naked or semi-naked pictures or clips.
Concerns for her welfare have been raised about her posts, but as she explains in the book: “I know that a lot of people don’t understand why I love taking pictures of myself naked or in new dresses… I think if they’d been photographed by other people thousands of times, prodded and posed for other people’s approval, they’d understand that I get a lot of joy from posing the way I feel sexy and taking my own picture.”
Instagram aside, The Woman In Me is the first chance to hear about all of these much-covered ups and downs of her life in in Spears’s own words. She is honest about her flaws – that she was never good at fame, that she did occasionally take prescription drugs, she did cheat – but it is clear she was let down by so many. There is an undercurrent of anger: at the industry, the men who wronged her, her family, all those who made money out of Brand Britney while she was suffering.
Like many child stars before her, Spears has not experienced a normal transition into adulthood. At least now, hopefully, she gets to call the shots. Her book gives her the chance to have her say, but she doesn’t want to look back and reflect on the what ifs.
“It’s difficult for me to revisit this darkest chapter of my life and to think about what might have been different if I’d pushed back harder then,” she says of the conservatorship. “I don’t at all like to think about that… I can’t afford to, honestly. I’ve been through too much.”
Entertainment
Sir Rod Stewart ‘devastated’ after cancelling more US concerts as he recovers from flu
Sir Rod Stewart says he is devastated to have to cancel a series of US concerts, blaming lingering flu for the decision.
It affects four shows in Nevada, along with a further two in California, which he plans to reschedule.
They were due to take place over the next eight days.
“So sorry my friends. I’m devastated and sincerely apologise for any inconvenience to my fans. I’ll be back on stage and will see you soon,” he wrote in a message on Instagram.
Sir Rod, 80, has been struggling to recover from flu and this week had already cancelled two concerts at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas.
On Wednesday, he disclosed that his doctor had “ordered” him to take “a bit more rest”.
The star is in the midst of his epic One Last Time Tour.
Sir Rod, who was recently put on vocal rest, is due to play the legends slot at Glastonbury later this month.
In May, he was presented with a lifetime achievement award at the American Music Awards (AMAs).
Sir Rod performing at the 2025 American Music Awards in Las Vegas. Pic: Reuters
In a sign of how seriously the singer takes his health, last month he was also spotted in Italy attempting to avoid conversations to preserve his voice.
He wore a message attached to a lanyard which read: “Sorry. Cannot talk. Having vocal rest.”
In 2024, he promised he would not retire but confirmed his 2025 European and North American shows would bring an end to his “large-scale world tours”.
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Beyonce starts London leg of tour
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The performer, best known for songs including Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?, Every Beat Of My Heart, and Maggie May, said he plans to focus on more intimate venues instead.
Sir Rod has faced other health challenges in the past.
In May 2000, he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and had surgery. In 2017, he underwent successful treatment for prostate cancer.
More often than not, the inclusion of women in an action film is shaped by the male gaze, the tropes, the stereotypical backstory and/or the unnecessary physique-revealing scenes connected to it.
“That’s a pet peeve of mine,” director Len Wiseman tells Sky News in an interview for his new John Wick spin-off starring Ana de Armas.
“I think a lot of times you see it’s overly sexualized or there’s not a realism to it, and it is important to me that [this was] approached from a female [perspective] that can be labelled: ‘A woman is strong to begin with’. I think there can be some kind of pandering in certain ways that I think is too far.”
Wiseman started his career with the female-led action film franchise Underworld starring his former partner Kate Beckinsale before directing Die Hard 4.0, Total Recall and Sleepy Hollow.
From The World Of John Wick: Ballerina serves as a spin-off to the John Wick films and is set between the events of the third and fourth movies.
It follows a young trainee assassin who looks to be the next world-renowned assassin in the film universe.
“We never wanted to go as far as Eve looking like we were doing a female John Wick. Eve is Eve and is a woman… and it’s a woman in a man’s world,” says de Armas.
“That phrase ‘fight like a girl’, we wanted that to come across as something really empowering and really pull from there. That is a motivation for her. That has been said before in a derogatory way or as something diminishing.”
De Armas insists she didn’t want to be a ‘female John Wick’. Pic: Murray Close/Lionsgate
Wiseman and de Armas both say that while they wanted Eve to be strong, they also wanted her to feel every moment of the battle. If there are choreographed fight scenes or flashy action moves, she feels them.
“I wanted her to struggle,” explains de Armas, detailing how she consistently asked for her to look more dishevelled as the film progresses.
“It didn’t come from a place of I need to prove myself, I don’t need to prove myself to anybody, but I wanted to do that from the moment we started talking about the script, we even brought on board a female writer, because it was important for me to have that.”
De Armas, similar to her soon-to-be co-star Tom Cruise, relished in undertaking the more difficult stunts and wore the bruises and marks from them like badges of honour.
Playing Eve involved stunts and even some bruises. Pic: Larry D Horricks/Lionsgate
The actress would even send photos of the markings the following day to Wiseman proudly as she jokes: “I just wanted to keep him posted, you know, on how my body was at the end of the day.”
The film was shot practically, with the explosions and countless action surprises for film fans happening on set repeatedly.
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When asked about her toughest stunt to execute, without hesitation, she mentions a scene which included prop grenades.
“All the debris and everything that was flying with those grenades were real, so most of the dust and the little things flying were getting in my eyes, and I just could not open my eyes during the scene. So in between takes, the medics were like just rinsing my eyes with some water.”
With a film set around changing the meaning of ‘fight like a girl’, de Armas says she has a clear definition of it now: “Be yourself and make people gravitate around you and your rules. You make your own rules.”
From The World Of John Wick: Ballerina is in cinemas now.
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