Kevin Federline’s memoir, You Thought You Knew, comes out next week and is already getting lots of buzz for its descriptions of his ex-wife, Britney Spears. The pair were married from 2004 to 2007 and share two sons, Sean Preston and Jayden James. In the book, Federline reportedly shares his concern for the singer’s well-being and claims that their sons were afraid to stay at her house as teenagers. But Spears’s camp has accused Federline of “profiting off her” and called his book “sensationalism.”
According to the New York Times, Federline writes that his sons became scared of staying with Spears at some point while they were teenagers. (It’s unclear exactly when this happened.) “They would awaken sometimes at night to find her standing silently in the doorway, watching them sleep — ‘Oh, you’re awake?’ — with a knife in her hand,” Federline writes, per the Times. “Then she’d turn around and pad off without explanation.”
Later in the book, Federline claims that Spears’s behavior since 2021, when she was released from her conservatorship, has caused concern. “It’s become impossible to pretend everything’s OK,” he writes. “From where I sit, the clock is ticking, and we’re getting close to the 11th hour. Something bad is going to happen if things don’t change, and my biggest fear is that our sons will be left holding the pieces.”
Following the release of these excerpts, a representative for Spears suggested Federline’s decision to share these revelations was connected to the fact that Spears recently stopped paying child support. “With news from Kevin’s book breaking, once again he and others are profiting off her and sadly it comes after child support has ended with Kevin,” a spokesman for Spears told the Times. “All she cares about are her kids, Sean Preston and Jayden James, and their well-being during this sensationalism. She detailed her journey in her memoir.”
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TMZ reported that Spears stopped paying child support last November, after Jayden James turned 18. Her relationship with her sons has reportedly been strained for years — Federline was granted full custody back in 2008 after a messy legal battle. In 2022, Federline said that the boys had “decided they are not seeing her right now” and that they hadn’t attended her wedding to Sam Asghari. Last year, TMZ reported that Jayden had begun to see Spears again following years of estrangement. But Federline’s attorney said the former dancer had not heard anything about a reconciliation.
On the one hand, Federline’s relationship with Spears will certainly motivate readers to check out the book. On the other, it’s hard to tell what’s going on beyond Spears’s Instagram videos. For everyone’s sake, this seems like a situation to be mediated by a professional rather than hashed out in a highly publicized memoir.
