Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake took serious measures to keep their abortion a secret. In Spears’s new memoir, The Woman in Me, out October 24, she explains just how the couple managed to leave the aggressively nosy public out of her incredibly personal decision. “We also decided on something that in retrospect wound up being, in my view, wrong, and that was that I should not go to a doctor or hospital to have the abortion,” she remembers. “It was important that no one find out about the pregnancy or the abortion, which meant doing everything at home.” Outside of Timberlake, whom she dated publicly from 1999 to 2002, only Spears’s confidant and assistant Felicia Culotta knew about the decision. Both were there “on the appointed day” when Spears took “the little pills.” “I went into the bathroom and stayed there for hours, lying on the floor, sobbing and screaming,” she says, describing “unbelievable” pain. “I went down to the ground on my knees, holding the toilet.”
For some reason, Timberlake thought the dulcet tones of his guitar would be an anesthetic. “Justin came into the bathroom and lay on the floor with me,” recalls Spears. “At some point he thought maybe music would help, so he got his guitar and he lay there with me, strumming it.” The pain continued. “Still, they didn’t take me to the hospital,” she writes. The event left her “messed up for a while, especially because I still did love Justin so much. It was insane how much I loved him, and for me, it was unfortunate.”
Previous excerpts from the book revealed that the decision largely came down to the fact that Timberlake “was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father,” even though for Spears, it “wasn’t a tragedy” — she “always expected” the couple to have a family together one day. “Abortion was something I never could have imagined choosing for myself, but given the circumstances, this is what we did,” the megastar writes. “If he didn’t want to become a father, I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice. I wouldn’t want to push him into something he didn’t want. Our relationship was too important to me.” Timberlake broke up with Spears sometime after they ended the pregnancy. He went on to slyly perpetuate a narrative that his ex was to blame for the breakup during the press tour for his 2002 debut album, Justified. He even cast a Spears look-alike in the music video for its single “Cry Me a River.”
“I was described as a harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy,” Spears recounts. “The truth: I was comatose in Louisiana, and he was happily running around Hollywood.” She adds, “May I just say that on his explosive album and in all the press that surrounded it, Justin neglected to mention the several times he cheated on me?”
This post has been updated throughout with additional information throughout from The Woman in Me, out October 24.
