Britney Spears‘ upcoming tell-all memoir, The Woman in Me, includes a shocking claim about her teenage romance with fellow Mickey Mouse Club star Justin Timberlake. The couple famously began dating in 1999, when she was 17 and the *NSYNC star was 18, just as their careers were exploding.
“It was a surprise, but for me it wasn’t a tragedy. I loved Justin so much,” she writes in the book, according to an excerpt published People, which Billboard can confirm. “I always expected us to have a family together one day. This would just be much earlier than I anticipated.”
“If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it,” she continues. “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,” she also writes of having an abortion.
Billboard has reached out to Timberlake’s rep for comment.
A series of excerpts from the book this week in People describes Spears’ life under her restrictive 13-year conservatorship, as well as the story behind her infamous head-shaving incident in 2007, and what she describes as fat-shaming at the hands of her estranged father, Jamie Spears.
Spears and Timberlake broke up 2002 and she married former back-up dancer Kevin Federline in 2004. She and Federline had two children — Sean Preston and Jayden James — before their split in 2007.
The Woman in Me arrives Oct. 24.
