Britney Spears Had An Abortion With Justin Timberlake
Before there was Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani, or Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz or even Beyoncé and Jay-Z, there was Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears.
Pop music’s golden couple was quite much the prettiest thing you ever did see when they started dating in1999 They shared anecdotes about how they established shared squashes while working together as tweens in 1992 on The All-New Mickey Mouse Club (he was her veryfirst kiss!) before reconnecting 7 years lateron.
At the time, Spears was about to break through with her multiplatinum launching …Baby One More Time that made school uniforms cool and momsanddads aghast and Timberlake was difficult at work on ‘N Sync‘s follow up to their similarly effective self-titled release.
Theirs was a connection filled with all the enthusiasm and enjoyment of veryfirst love—”I was enamored with her from the minute I saw her,” he lateron informed GQ—plus a heady rush of success with the set controling in a area likewise inhabited by the likes of Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, Destiny’s Child and the Backstreet Boys.
They carriedout throughout the Super Bowl halftime program and appeared together on Saturday Night Live. They gathered more prizes than they might potentially screen in their shared Hollywood Hills home and practically handled to make matching denim-on-denim-on-denim appearance excellent at the American Music Awards. (They didn’t, however if anybody could have pulled off denims as official wear it would haveactually been music’s flaxen-tressed power duo.)
“I love him from the bottom of my heart. As far as love is worried, with him, too much is not enough. He’s whatever,” Spears mused in a September 2001 interview with The Guardian. “It is a muchdeeper love now than when I was moreyouthful. Like, we’ve gone through so much together and we’ve understood each other consideringthat we were 12 years old. We understand each other inside and out.”
Until one day, apparently out of the blue, they simply didn’t, news of their March 2002 breakup tearin’ up fans’ hearts.
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Decades before joint split declarations published to social media were basic, 21-year-old Timberlake and 20-year-old Spears were left to discuss what the f–k occurred over and over and over onceagain. (And assoonas more, for excellent step, Spears revealing their relationship drama and their choice to get an abortion amid other facts in her soon-to-be-released narrative The Woman in Me.)
Almost instantly, unfaithful reports formed, Timberlake assisting to fan those specific flames with cagey pricesestimate about how he “promised her” he wouldn’t share what tookplace and his November 2002 release of “Cry Me a River,” a tale about a sad, mistreated male that the vocalist stated “was composed in a time of discomfort.”
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The Woman in Me by Britney Spears
In this effective memoir, Britney informs her own story on her own terms.
For Spears, the battle was more than simply losing the individual she’d been picturing permanently with because she was a teenager. “I’m still harming, however I am attempting to see it as an experience,” she showed to The Sun in 2002. “The worst thing is everybody desires to talk to me about it. Everywhere I go individuals are asking how I am.”
Basically, as Spears reflected in an Instagram post in April 2020, some 18 years after the reality, “We had one of the world’s greatest separations.”
With Timberlake excited to promote his brand-new solo effort Justified (“At this point in my life, if you actually desire to understand who my sweetheart is, it’s those 13 tunes on that CD,” he keptinmind to Barbara Walters), the post-separation press onslaught wasn’t all that bad for him.
“It’s amusing duetothefactthat every time somebody interviews me they’re like, ‘You understand, listen, I actually hate to ask this, however…'” he informed E! at the time, discussing why he was unbothered by the requirement line of questioning. “For me, I’m actually indifferent.”
After all, he did have a item to push, his preliminary single off his November 2002 debut disc, “Like I Love You,” only reaching No. 11 on the Billboard charts. And if that indicated sharing anecdotes about the heartbreaking end to his first-ever major love, he’d do it with a captivating smile and simply enough openness for fans to presume that he was the mistreated celebration.
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“I keepinmind when we chose we were going to go our different methods, we sat down and I stated to her, ‘If there’s ever a minute where you ever requirement me, you can rest ensured that I will be there, since I love you as a individual and I will constantly love you,'” he remembered, speaking with Walters for 20/20 in November2002 “But I likewise stated, ‘Look, no matter what we state at this point individuals are going to hypothesize things, and I might actually get myself in a terrible position if I was to state something and someone misinterpreted, duetothefactthat that occurs all the time.'”
He definitely didn’t desire to provide anybody the incorrect concept, he continued, so he’d simply share that he’d “promised her that I wouldn’t state particularly why we broke up.”
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But oughtto anybody care to read inbetween the lines, he was pleased to play a coupleof bars from “Horrible Woman,” a brand-new track he’d composed that consistedof the lyrics, “I idea our love was so strong / I guess I was dead incorrect / But to appearance at it favorably, hi woman / At least you provided me another tune about a dreadful lady.”
Asked straight-out about the unfaithful accusations, he informed Walters, “Honestly, I suggest, you understand, we’re not ideal. I puton’t judge anyperson.”
There were plenty of others to handle that.
In “Framing Britney Spears,” the 2020 episode of FX’s The New York Times Presents docu-series, we were all advised how crassly the twentysomethings’ sex life was talkedabout in the wake of their split and simply how quickly Spears was slotted into the function of badguy.
Timberlake might barely handle a straight face when Walters brought up a quote Spears hadactually provided stating “good morals mean waiting to have sex upuntil after you’ve been wed.” Asked if they’d “lived up” to that messaging throughout their relationship, he split, “Sure,” with a laugh before looking straight into the electroniccamera and duplicating himself: “Sure.”
He’d currently resolved the topic 2 months earlier on the Star and Buc Wild Morning Show. When asked, “Did you f–k Britney Spears, yes or no?”, he reacted, “Okay, I did it!” triggering the gaggle of brothers to break out in raucous cheers.
By the time he covered Details in December 2002, the mag was proclaiming, “Can we ever forgive Justin Timberlake for all that sissy music? Hey…at least he got into Britney’s trousers.”
The age of knowledge this was not. With the #MeToo motion and terms like “sex-positivity” still a couple of decades off, Timberlake was hailed as a dominating hero; Spears, a doubtful function design for her young fans.
And though the “Sometimes” vocalist stayed quiet on what did or did not take location behind closed doors at the time, she admitted to Diane Sawyer throughout that much-maligned-in-retrospect November 2003 interview, “It was a actually unusual time.”
Listening to her previous sweetheart happily meal on “what we did together, sexually and things,” she continued, “I simply felt really madeuseof and extremely odd. I was like, ‘Why is he going on these reveals and they’re asking him and he’s talking?’ You understand, however I’m sure, simply like right now, you’re asking me about it and I’m talking about it and it simply kind of comes out.”
Because there was little time for the pop princess to prevent the topic. She had her own disc to promote—2003’s In the Zone serving as her fourth release in less than 5 years. Only now she’d have to do it whilst evading concerns about her ex-boyfriend’s music.
“Cry Me a River,” Justified‘s 2nd single a track mostly presumed to be an autobiographical take on their split mostlikely would haveactually eclipsed its predecessor “Like I Love You,” with its lyrics alone: “You puton’t have to state what you did / I currently understand, I discovered out from him.” But when the video dropped, including 18-ye