Britney Spears is continuing to push back at claims made by her ex-husband Kevin Federline in his upcoming memoir.
“To be loved unconditionally and with a naive heart like mine, always being threatened or made to believe I’m the bad one as they profit off my pain,” Spears wrote in a lengthy post on Instagram on Thursday, without specifying any names. “I 100 percent beg to differ the way he is literally attacking me in his interviews. If truth be told the man in the interview went STRAIGHT TO the SOURCE and said it CLEAR AS DAY… no money from Britney for 5 years you trying to get paid that’s what general America is saying weird you both have moved on… your kids are adults it’s a different world now … why is HE SO ANGRY.”
While the pop star didn’t specify who “he” is in the post, it appears that she was once again hitting back at Federline as excerpts of his upcoming tell-all memoir are being released.
“If you really love someone then you don’t help them by humiliating them,” Spears continued in the Thursday post. “What scared me was how serious and angry he got, people have no idea, it is way worse than anyone could imagine… the boy hates me and it is deep anger to literally say the things he is saying.”
The post comes after Spears shared a statement on Instagram on Wednesday about her ex-husband’s “constant gaslighting.” “I have always pleaded and screamed to have a life with my boys. Relationships with teenage boys is complex. I have felt demoralized by this situation and have always asked and almost begged for them to be a part of my life. Sadly, they have always witnessed the lack of respect shown by [their] own father for me.”
Spears and Federline married in 2004, before welcoming sons Sean Preston, now 20, and Jayden James, now 19. The couple’s divorce was finalized in 2007.
“They need to take responsibility for themselves,” Spears added. “With one son only seeing me for 45 [minutes] in the past 5 years and the other with only 4 visits in the past 5 years, I have pride too. From now on I will let them know when I am available. Trust me, those white lies in that book, they are going straight to the bank and I am the only one who genuinely gets hurt here.”
In his upcoming memoir, You Thought You Knew, out on Oct. 21, Federline recounts a time in which he says their sons, as teens, were fearful of spending time at their mom’s home.
“They would awaken sometimes at night to find her standing silently in the doorway, watching them sleep — ‘Oh, you’re awake?’ — with a knife in her hand,” Federline writes, according to the New York Times. “Then she’d turn around and pad off without explanation.”
The Times story includes additional excerpts from Federline’s memoir, including his recounting of the evening when Spears was placed under a 72-hour involuntary psychiatric hold at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles following a three-hour standoff with their sons.
Recalling the incident, Federline writes, “It was one of the hardest nights of my life. … I felt sick over what she was going through. This was someone I had loved. Someone I had built a life with. The mother of my children.”
Federline further articulates his general concern for Spears in a later chapter, in which he writes that she is “racing toward something irreversible.”
“It’s become impossible to pretend everything’s OK,” he writes. “From where I sit, the clock is ticking, and we’re getting close to the 11th hour. Something bad is going to happen if things don’t change, and my biggest fear is that our sons will be left holding the pieces.”
In Spears’s own memoir, released in 2023, she reflected on her break from Federline and what it was like losing custody of their sons. Following their divorce, Federline was granted full physical custody of Sean Preston and Jayden James. Federline currently has custody of the boys, whom he relocated to Hawaii with his wife in 2023.
“If they’d let me live my life, I know I would’ve followed my heart and come out of this the right way and worked it out,” the “Stronger” singer writes of initially losing custody.
Spears was held under a controversial conservatorship for 14 years until November 2021, when, bolstered by the #FreeBritneyMovement, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Brenda Penny agreed to terminate the legal arrangement.
The conservatorship was divided into two parts: the conservatorship of Spears’s estate, which involved control over all her income and financial decisions, and the conservatorship of Spears’s person, which concerned her mental and physical well-being.
“I just want my life back. And it’s been 13 years. And it’s enough,” Spears said during a 2021 court hearing regarding her conservatorship. “I deserve to have a life. I’ve worked my whole life. I deserve to have a two- to three-year break and just, you know, do what I want to do. … I deserve to have the same rights as anybody does, by having a child, a family, any of those things, and more so.”
Ending Spears’s conservatorship, Federline argues in his book, has had a negative impact on their sons.
“Now more than ever, [our children] need your support. I’ve been their buffer for years, but now it’s bigger than me,” he writes. “It’s time to sound the alarm.”