Justin Timberlake has finally revealed that his hit 2006 song, What Goes Around… Comes Around, was not written about ex-girlfriend Britney Spears.

Since its debut, many have believed the song was about Spears, as it came out around the time the pop star was divorcing Kevin Federline. However, that’s just not the case, according to Timberlake.

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“Maybe I should dispel a rumour at this point, which has gone around forever, which is like, it’s not a personal story from mine,” Timberlake said during a recent appearance on Complex’s Re-Rank YouTube series.

“It’s actually a personal story from a friend’s that I asked permission [to use],” he said of the track, which was a single off his 2006 album, FutureSex/LoveSounds.

Timberlake, 45, explained that the song was informed by a friend’s break-up.

“He was just going through it and he was telling me what had happened, and I said, ‘Do you mind if I write about this?’ And I quote, my friend said, ‘Yeah, torch that b***h. What goes around comes around.’ And I was like, ‘I have to go. Thank you’,” Timberlake recalled.

The Mirrors singer said he wrote the song in “damn near 20 minutes”.

Paired with the 10-minute long music video, he said it “hit on all cylinders” for him. In the YouTube show, Timberlake ranked the song as number “one or two” in his discography.

However, while What Goes Around… Comes Around is not about Spears, 44, another one of his songs might be — and that’s Cry Me a River, from his 2002 debut album, Justified.

In the music video, he sings alongside a Spears look-alike, who is portrayed to have been cheating on him.

Timberlake and Spears, who’d first met on The All-New Mickey Mouse Club as children, began dating in 1999 and broke up after three years, in 2002.

However, in her 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me, the Toxic singer claimed that the media storm that followed the Cry My a River music video’s release made her look like a “harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy”.

“I was comatose in Louisiana, and he was happily running around Hollywood,” she shared.

In the book, she also claimed that Timberlake had cheated on her “several times,” though she didn’t name anyone in particular.

In a since-deleted January 2024 Instagram post, Spears apologised to the Friends With Benefits actor and said that she was “in love” with his new song at the time, Selfish.

“I wanna apologise for some of the things I wrote about in my book. If I offended any of the people I genuinely care about I am deeply sorry,” Spears wrote at the time, along with a photo of Timberlake appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

“I also wanted to say I am in love with Justin Timberlake’s new song Selfish,’” she added. “It is soo good and how come every time I see Justin and Jimmy together I laugh so hard???”

This story originally appeared in Page Six and was republished here with permission

Originally published as Justin Timberlake reveals whether hit song is about ex Britney Spears