Looking at headlines last week, you’d be forgiven if you thought it was 2007: “Britney Spears Calls Out Kevin Federline’s ‘Lies,’” “Kevin Federline Details Britney Spears’s Alleged Drug Use,” “Inside Britney Spears and Kevin Federline’s All-Out War.” Federline, Spears’s backup-dancer ex-husband and father of her children, Jayden and Preston, has returned to the public eye to promote his new tell-all memoir, You Thought You Knew, which paints a vivid portrait of Spears as a mentally unstable and unfit mother.
In the book, Federline alleges that Spears used cocaine while breastfeeding and drank alcohol while pregnant. He also accuses her of behaving inappropriately with her youngest son, insisting that they bathed together even when he was as old as 10; screaming at her sons that she wished they were dead; and, in one harrowing moment, standing over their beds with a knife in her hand. He refers to the mother of his children as “Joan Crawford on crack.” (Spears has denied the allegations and accused Federline of profiting off her struggles: “If you really love someone then you don’t help them by humiliating them,” she tweeted.)
The Joan Crawford comparison is particularly telling, given how synonymous she is with the psycho-mommy archetype in popular culture. As I write in my upcoming book about the history of the trope, attacking a woman for being a “bad mom” is an extremely efficient way to destroy her reputation. In a world in which women are raised from birth to serve as dutiful wives and nurturers, a woman’s failure to do so is perceived as nothing less than a betrayal of her biological nature.
This isn’t the first time Federline has attacked Spears’s parenting skills. In 2022, he posted old videos on Instagram of Spears arguing with her children, seemingly in response to Spears complaining that her sons were acting “hateful” during a recent visit with them. Now, he’s taking his allegations onto daytime talk shows. “I’ve tried to help my sons build a relationship with their mother, and I’ve prayed to God every day that she gets the help she needs and wakes up,” he told Entertainment Tonight’s Kevin Frazier in an interview last week. In a CBS Mornings appearance to talk about the interview, Frazier told the show’s hosts that Federline wrote the book with his children’s blessing and that his only objective is for them to rebuild a relationship with Spears.
In the 2000s, Federline was largely treated as a joke, a hanger-on, and deadbeat dad whose own questionable parenting decisions — including the fact that he left his pregnant fiancé and their child to date Spears in the first place and continued partying at all hours after Spears had their children — faced tabloid scrutiny. By casting himself as the mature, levelheaded parent with his kids’ best interests at heart, he doesn’t just position himself in direct opposition to his ex-wife, he is also trying to rehabilitate his own image.
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Federline says he’s publishing his memoir now — almost 20 years since Spears lost custody of her children and was placed under a conservatorship, and a year after Spears stopped paying child support — to get Spears the support she needs. Her sons are now 18 and 20 and have periodically been estranged from Spears; Federline writes in his memoir that at one point, they refused to see her. “As a father, I’m terrified that one day I might wake up and my sons are going to have to deal with the unimaginable,” he told Frazier. “I have to sound the alarm.”
But how does telling the world about how a hysterical Spears escaped rehab in 2007 and climbed the fence of their home so she could see their children, or how she once walked into his house uninvited with “one boob hanging out of a ripped shirt,” further that goal? How does that accomplish anything other than further humiliating a woman who has already been humiliated enough?
Spears has very publicly struggled for decades. Though she is free of the conservatorship, she has not released new music in years, and on Instagram, where she regularly posts bizarre, incoherently captioned videos in which she dances seductively in her underwear, one gets the sense that we are witnessing her unraveling in real time. Federline’s claims about Spears’s private substance abuse and mental-health issues 20 years ago — struggles that Spears herself wrote about at length in her own memoir, The Woman in Me — are neither revelatory nor interesting. It feels less like a concerned father’s plea on behalf of his children and more like a prizefighter continuing to rain blows on an opponent who has long been down for the count.
Not everyone is on Federline’s side here. On social media, fans have suggested he’s exploiting his wife’s struggles for profit, and Spears’s exes Sam Asghari and Jason Alexander have also issued public statements accusing Federline of opportunism. But it’s hard to see the faux-pearl-clutching about Spears going mainstream again — not just because it’s been so long since she lost custody of her children, both of whom are now grown. In this context, litigating Spears’s mothering in public seems gratuitous, even cruel. But for those who followed the obsessive tabloid coverage of her breakdown in the 2000s, it is, unfortunately, all too familiar.
