Topics: Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, World News, Books, Sex and Relationships, Celebrity, Hollywood
Britney Spears has explained why she lied about who she lost her virginity to for three decades.
The 43-year-old pop icon has confessed she's had a bit of a 'Toxic' secret of her own for the past 30 years.
Spears has opened up a lot more about her life ever since her father's controversial conservatorship over her came to an end in 2021 after 13 long years.
The mom-of-two also settled some other messy legal issues with her dad, Jamie Spears, for an undisclosed sum last year.
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Now, her latest memoir, The Woman in Me, which hit shelves in 2023 is doing the rounds as fans learn some interesting insight into the 'Princess of Pop' that has never been discussed before.
Spears, who shot to fame as a child under the wings of Disney, wrote that when her career started, her publicists were keen to market her to the world in a very specific way.
This included a restraint on her sex life - and she couldn't go into detail about things like what age she lost her virginity.
She wrote: "The truth was, if you’re young and single in Hollywood, if there’s even a rumor that you’ve had sex, you’re labelled a slut. So my team created this whole narrative around me."
This was despite her high-profile relationship with Justin Timberlake, whom she met through The All-New Mickey Mouse Club in 1992 before they came out as a couple in 1999.
The couple, who were both 18, even lived together - and even still Spears was encouraged to keep up the lie.
"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 the pair went their separate ways in 2002, Spears kept up the lie, saying in 2003 that 'two years into my relationship with Justin' was the first time she had ever sex.
"Why did my managers work so hard to claim I was some kind of young-girl virgin even into my twenties? Whose business was it if I'd had sex or not?" the 'Oops!... I Did It Again' singer added.
In the memoir, Spears finally came clean and explained how she actually had lost her virginity at 14 years old to her brother’s childhood buddy, recalling how she was a freshman and he was a senior at the time.
The confession comes as her bestselling memoir, which shot to number one on the New York Times best seller list in its first week of release, is reportedly fuelling a Britney Spears biopic, set to be directed by Wicked’s Jon M. Chu.
The book details the star's battles with her mental health, conservatorship under her father and other intimate details like her exploitation in the music industry and her decision to have an abortion.
When her conservatorship ended in 2021, Spears said she wouldn't wish the 'pain' of it on anyone and was finding it 'extremely hard' to accept what had happened to her over the years.
