Britney Spears alleges misogynist Justin Timberlake coerced her into an abortion
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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Justin Timberlake has spent years dragging Britney Spears as a cheater and a whore. After the pop stars, who dated from 1999 to 2002, abruptly split, Timberlake told the world that Spears was not in fact a virgin, teasing that he was responsible for deflowering her.
When the tabloids ran wild with the rumor that Spears was solely responsible for their split by cheating on Timberlake, the latter cast a Spears doppelganger in his music video for the song “Cry Me a River,” which, of course, was about a cheating harlot breaking the heart of our narrating hero.
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To be clear, Timberlake was no adolescent spilling regrettable gossip into the public eye in the immediate aftermath of his grief. He repeatedly asserted that “Cry Me A River” was indeed about the less-than-virginal Spears throughout more than a decade after their split, including in his 2018 memoir, which he wrote years after marrying and having multiple children.
Well, now we know why Team Timberlake was reportedly so petrified that Spears would finally publish her jaw-dropping memoir. In an excerpt published by People magazine, the bestselling female artist of the 2000s alleged that Timberlake effectively coerced her into aborting their unborn baby.
“It was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy,” Spears said about her pregnancy. “I loved Justin so much. I always expected us to have a family together one day. This would just be much earlier than I’d anticipated. But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young. I don’t know if that was the right decision. If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it. And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father.”
Timberlake’s evident coercion described here is best understood as a feature, not a bug, of his persistent and aggressive misogyny. Recall that the same man who made the virginity (or lack thereof) and personal proclivities of his teenage girlfriend the topic of international discussion is the same man who forcibly ripped off Janet Jackson’s top, exposing her bare breast during the literal Super Bowl halftime show.
Although Jackson maintained that it was a wardrobe malfunction, she shouldered all of the blame and was widely blacklisted by the entertainment industry and specifically Viacom and Super Bowl host CBS, per the orders of Les Moonves (who was himself later outed as a serial sex pest). To the horror of Jackson’s parents, who were horrified the singer was thrown under the bus for Timberlake’s actions, Timberlake stayed mostly mum on the topic. He headlined the Super Bowl halftime show once more in 2018.
Timberlake and Spears were indeed young when she alleges she became pregnant, sure, but the two had resources that parents 10 years older could only dream of. As she made clear back then and now, she was in love with Timberlake and saw a family and a forever in their future. But to misogynists like Timberlake, abortion is a convenient emergency exit, the first glass to break before bailing on a committed relationship and dragging a former partner through the global stage as nothing but a cheater and whore.