Britney Spears reveals abuse at hands of alcoholic dad who called her fat & turned her into ‘child-like robot’
BRITNEY Spears has told for the first time in her own words how her alcoholic father and her long-term conservator has terrified her since childhood.
The Sun can reveal the pop icon, 41, uses the first pages of her upcoming autobiography The Woman In Me to savage Jamie Spears – accusing him of being “mean, apathetic and cold” during her childhood.
She goes on to say Jamie continued to belittle her well into her 30s – often branding her “fat” and ordering her to work against her will while under her thirteen year Conservatorship.
The Toxic hitmaker says Jamie, 71, would regularly “drink until he couldn’t think” during her pre-fame days so much so that she was terrified to get into the car with him while growing up in Kentwood, Louisiana.
In one extract from the book, out October 24 and seen by The Sun, Britney pens: “Dad drank until he couldn’t think. He disappeared from home for several days at a time. And when he was drunk, he got really mean.”
The superstar says her father’s relationship with booze caused his businesses to fail and money to dry up – only heightening the issues at home.
She writes: “The stress of not having any money was compounded by the chaos caused by Dad’s extreme mood swings.
“I was especially afraid to get in the car with him because he used to talk to himself while driving. I didn’t even understand what he said. He seemed to be in his own world.”
Britney goes on to say that she now believes her father’s alcoholism was triggered by suffering abuse from his own father, June Spears.
She heartbreakingly adds: “But at the time I had no idea why he was so hard on us, and why nothing we ever did seemed good enough in his eyes.
“To me, the saddest thing was that I had always just wanted a father who loved me just the way I was – someone who said, ‘I love you, period. You can do anything. I would love you forever unconditionally.'”
Having already appeared on Disney Channel’s The Mickey Mouse Club alongside Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera, by the time she was in “eighth grade” – around twelve to thirteen years old – Britney says she and her mum Lynne Spears would enjoy boozy cocktails – but never to the extent her father would hit the bottle.
To counteract her troubled upbringing in the deep south of America, Britney would run off into the woods to sing or even simply hide in wardrobes for hours on end.
She locked herself in wardrobes so often it became a “running joke” in her household.
In extracts seen by The Sun, Britney writes: “When I sing I am myself. To me singing is a magical place where the noise no longer has any meaning, where everything is possible.
“All I wanted was to leave the everyday world and enter this other realm where I could express myself without having to think.
“When I was alone with my thoughts, my mind was filled with worries and fears. But the music put an end to all worries, gave me self-esteem.
“As long as I was singing, I was half outside the ordinary world.
“Singing was like a bridge between reality and fantasy, between the world in which I lived and the world in which I desperately wanted to live.”
Britney says the “soul-crushing” feeling of never quite hitting the mark in her dad’s eyes has never left her.
In an extract released via People Magazine in America, Britney says after two decades of abuse she was little more than a soulless robot performing on stage while locked in a seemingly never ending Conservatorship.
Britney was placed in the legal hold, usually only used for the elderly or severely mentally ill, for thirteen years after her infamous breakdown in 2007 and 2008 in which she shaved her head in front of the world’s media.
During that time her father had full legal control of her life – including her money and her body.
She previously alleges he had an IUD implanted in her body to stop her getting pregnant with then boyfriend and now ex-husband Sam Asghari, 29.
Britney was eventually released from the Conservatorship in November 2021.
The Grammy winner writes: “Feeling like you’re never good enough is a soul-crushing state of being for a child.
“He’d drummed that message into me as a girl, and even after I’d accomplished so much, he was continuing to do that to me.
“I became a robot. But not just a robot — a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself.”
Despite being in her mid 30s, Britney found herself blocked from making any decision at all about her life.
In a running theme from her childhood, Britney says her father “repeatedly told me I looked fat and that I was going to have to do something about it”.
During her time in the Conservatorship Britney released four albums, three world tours and completed a recording breaking Piece of Me residency at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas grossing £112 million over four years.
She was also a judge on The X Factor USA alongside Simon Cowell and Demi Lovato.
Speaking at a Conservatorship Hearing in June 2021 as she battled to regain control of her life, Britney told the judge her father loved the power and control he had over her.
Speaking in relation to him sending her to a mental health facility in 2019 against her will, Britney said: “I cried on the phone for an hour and he loved every minute of it.
“The control he had over someone as powerful as me. He loved the control to hurt his own daughter one hundred thousand percent.”
In a second extract released to PEOPLE magazine, Britney says the abuse she suffered drained her of both her womanhood and her love of music.
Britney writes: “The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage.
“I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me. Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself.
“I think back now on my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for that long and it makes me feel sick. Think of how many male artists gambled all their money away; how many had substance abuse or mental health issues.
“No one tried to take away their control over their bodies and money. I didn’t deserve what my family did to me.
“The thing was: I accomplished a lot during that time when I was supposedly incapable of taking care of myself.
“I sometimes thought that it was almost funny how I won those awards for the album I made while I was supposedly so incapacitated that I had to be controlled by my family.
“The truth was, though, when I stopped to think about it for very long, it wasn’t funny at all.
“This is what’s hard to explain, how quickly I could vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom.
“There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl; but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult.”
Britney Spears: The Woman In Me is released worldwide October 24th via Gallery UK.