A couple years back, when we as a culture were revisiting how Britney Spears had been treated, a close confidant of hers dished on just how bad Justin Timberlake had hurt her. Now we have a whole new context for that pain.
We’re talking now of course about the revelation in Brit’s memoir, The Woman In Me, that she got pregnant with Justin’s baby in late 2000. The 19-year-old let Justin talk her into getting an abortion — though she really wanted to have the child. She wrote with tangible regret over the 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… To this day, it’s one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life.”
Yeah. Wow.
Naturally the reveal has fans rethinking everything that happened with the couple — including their rough breakup. It seems especially cruel what JT did to her in the aftermath.
We’re speaking of course about the breakup banger Cry Me A River. In the revenge-fueled music video, Justin sneaks into the home of an ex while she’s out with a new guy — and makes a sex tape on her bed. He then briefly spies on the Britney lookalike in the shower before leaving the vid playing on her TV for her to see.
Julianne Kaye, Britney’s makeup artist from 1999 to 2004, spoke about the effect that video had on her in a 2021 episode of the We Need To Talk About Britney podcast. She said:
“The video didn’t help, that he made. I think that really sent her over the edge. I think it was cruel… I thought that was really messed up. That really hurt her.”
Yeah, it clearly did what it was designed to do! It was particularly painful for Britney because, Julianne said, JT knew exactly how to hurt her most and went for it:
“To know Britney… her life was already so public and not hers, and she cried about it all the time. This is like all the time. ‘I want to be normal, I want to be…’ It was, like, looming over her. So the fact that he did that was to really go for the jugular… I mean, he basically said what happened, you know what I mean?”
And to know he did this after she had gone through such a devastating sacrifice for him. Even if they didn’t work out in the end, even if they really did get messy as hell and cheat on each other by the end of the relationship, he should have treated her with so much more respect afterward. If just for the fact she had an abortion, apparently specifically for him. Damn.
No wonder she was hurt so bad, even if she never told even Julianne that detail. How could he do it, knowing that??
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