Britney Spears: I Had Abortion With Justin Timberlake

Britney Spears has a memoir coming out next week, but one of the biggest bombshells appears to have dropped already. Spears writes that she had an abortion years ago when she was dating Justin Timberlake, reports Page Six. "I'm sure people will hate me for this, but I agreed not to have the baby," the 41-year-old writes in an excerpt of The Woman in Me at People. "I don't know if that was the right 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." Timberlake has not commented on the revelation. The pair dated from 1999 to 2002, per NBC News. Spears called the pregnancy a "surprise" but not necessarily a bad one.

"I loved Justin so much. I always expected us to have a family together one day," she writes. "But Justin definitely wasn't happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren't ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young." Spears is believed to have ended the pregnancy—"one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced"—in late 2000, when she was 18 or 19, per Page Six. After the pair's high-profile breakup in 2002, Timberlake boasted publicly about sleeping with Spears, who had told fans she would remain a virgin until marriage, per the BBC. He also implied she had cheated on him. (In 2021, Timberlake apologized to both Spears and Janet Jackson for his behavior with them.)