Now 43 years old, Spears has been speaking more openly about her life ever since her 13-year conservatorship, controlled by her father, officially ended in 2021. That major life change seems to have encouraged her to share more of her personal story with the world.
She also recently reached an out-of-court settlement with her father, resolving some long-standing legal disputes. The amount involved in the settlement hasn’t been made public.
In the book, Spears shared how, during the early stages of her career, her publicity team wanted to shape her image very carefully. As a result, she wasn’t allowed to talk openly about the age at which she first had sex.
Spears emphasized that this image didn’t make sense to the public, especially since she had been in a widely known relationship with Justin Timberlake.
“Given that I had so many teenage fans, my managers and press people had long tried to portray me as an eternal virgin – never mind that Justin Timberlake and I had been living together, and I’d been having sex since I was fourteen,” she penned in The Woman in Me.
Even after she and Timberlake ended their relationship in 2002, Spears continued to go along with the narrative her team had built. In a 2003 interview, she said that she first had sex “two years into my relationship with Justin,” keeping up the story she was told to stick with.
She admitted that she had been “marketed as the eternal virgin,” even though that was never true. Spears also explained how being forced to maintain that false image made her feel ashamed, as if she had somehow messed up by not fitting into the role others had written for her.
Looking back on the conservatorship that controlled her life for more than a decade, Spears said she would never wish that kind of pain on anyone. She confessed that coming to terms with what her family put her through has been “extremely hard” and deeply emotional.
