A knife came out.
Britney Spears and Kevin Federline are in an all-out war after the father of two reveals scathing claims in his memoir You Thought You Knew (out Tuesday) that his ex-wife was physically and verbally abusive to their sons and even used cocaine while breastfeeding them.
Federline, 47, wrote that when he entered the dressing room at a 2006 album release party, “Britney and her young star athlete friends were snorting fat Coke that was on the table…They didn’t even try to hide it.”
At the time, their son Sean Preston (who goes by his middle name) was 1 year old and Jayden James was 1 month old.
“Don’t go home and breastfeed your kids like this. Please call your mom or someone. You need to get formula. You can’t do that,” Federline remembers saying.
When his wife allegedly threw a drink at him, he wrote, “That was the proverbial last straw: the nursing. Her reaction. That’s what ended us.”
Page Six has reached out to representatives for Federline and Spears.
The book also alleges that Spears once punched Preston in the face when he was 10 or 11 years old.
On another occasion, Federline claims, the boys returned home from a visit with their mother with bleached hair.
“They weren’t just striped or lightly treated. Their scalps were also bleached. Their skin was burned,” he wrote. “We had to shave their heads, and their scalps looked like leopard prints from the chemical burns.”
According to the book, when the boys visited Spears, “sometimes they would wake up at night and find her standing quietly in the doorway watching them sleep — ‘Oh, are you awake?'” –He had a knife in his hand. ”
Federline claims other tragic incidents later came to light.
“And there were stories the boys shared as they grew up,” he writes. “Preston once told me that I punched him in the face.
The boys stopped seeing Spears after the former dancer moved out his family (including current wife Victoria and their young daughters Peyton and Jordan, now 19-year-old Preston and 18-year-old Jaden) in 2023.
Federline wrote that when she told Preston over the phone that she blamed her family for her problems, “To his credit, Mr. Preston confronted her. He accused her of lies and refused to accept her version of events. Her reaction was appalling. She told him that she, my brother, and I should all die.”
“How could a mother say that to her son? Preston has dealt with his own bitterness for years and has dealt with it better than I have… I’m afraid that such trauma will leave a scar that will last a lifetime,” he continued.
The revelation of all these damaging details prompted the singer to publicly fight back. On Wednesday, he called his ex-girlfriend “constant gaslighting” and dismissed the book as “very hurtful and exhausting” and “blank lies.”
“I beg you to be 100% different from the way he is literally attacking me…why is he so angry…and the scary thing is he is vindictive,” Spears wrote on Thursday. “If you truly loved someone, you wouldn’t help them by humiliating them.”
Otorhinolaryngology / SplashNews.com
Meanwhile, Federline told “Entertainment Tonight” this week: “I just hope[she]helps. I’m not going to expose her private life, but this is 10 times worse than what I said in the book.”
In the book, Federline, who grew up in Fresno, California, details his rise from being a backup dancer in the boy band LFO to the husband of one of the world’s biggest pop stars.
The couple met at Joseph’s nightclub in Hollywood in the summer of 2004, and their relationship quickly became a media sensation as Federline’s ex-girlfriend Shar Jackson was pregnant with their second child.
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Spears and Federline married three months after they met and became pregnant with Preston the following year.
However, the situation was turbulent. During one match, Federline said Spears threw a cocktail in his face. He learned from a television report that she had filed for divorce after three years of marriage, after which a bitter custody battle began.
Around this time, Ms. Spears became known for her public health problems, shaving her head and attacking paparazzi cars with an umbrella. Spears has since blamed her behavior on postpartum depression and grief over being separated from her sons.
“Everyone was scared of me, even my mother, because I shaved my head,” Spears wrote in her 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me. “I lost myself over and over again as I flopped through the weeks without my kids. I didn’t even really know how to take care of myself.”
Spears said the incident was one of the incidents that led to her being placed under a strict 13-year conservatorship, in which she was barred from driving, marrying and having children.
The singer’s team said in a statement this week: “Following news of Kevin’s book being published, he and others are once again profiting from her…”
A source defended Federline to Page Six as a good father, but added, “There’s zero leeway for[Spears]in this whole situation.”
Sources said the revelation was about the salary of the father of six, whose current job status is unknown, according to Federline’s book, who received $20,000 a month in alimony for 13 months, half of his marriage to Spears.
Spears paid $20,000 in child support for her sons until they turned 18.
“People like to think I’m just coasting through her money, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I wasn’t some scrappy person who just sat around waiting for a check…My Super Bowl commercial alone paid me almost $1 million in just three days of work,” Federline wrote of a 2007 Nationwide ad.
Around the same time, he was reportedly paid as much as $100,000 for paid appearances at clubs in Las Vegas and Miami. “At my peak, I was making $300,000 to over $500,000 a year,” he writes, but admits, “I spent that cash quickly.”
His wife Victoria worked as a special education teacher.
“Kevin is a really nice guy, but he was forced into a strange situation. He’s a very simple person and his entire public life is defined by his relationships,” a source told Page Six. “Kevin’s head and heart seemed to be in the right place.”
Federline claims in her book that her intention in writing the memoir was to “sound the alarm” about Spears’ alarming behavior.
Since her conservatorship was lifted in 2021, Britney has regained control of her life and is now in full control of her fortune, which is estimated to be between $40 million and $60 million.
But fans and observers have expressed concern about her presence on social media, including videos of her dancing with a knife and appearing disheveled and making bizarre comments. In one recent video posted on Instagram, dog excrement can be seen on the floor of her home.
Federline writes: “If things don’t change, something bad will happen.”
He has vigorously brought attention to her conservatorship, even calling on members of the #FreeBritney movement, who showed support for her throughout the legal battle, to reorganize as “Save Britney.”
“What does he want us to do? Hire a psychiatrist and send him to Britney’s home?” Pilar Vigneault, who helped organize the #FreeBritney movement, told Page Six.
“How can we help Britney if everything is redacted?” she added about the singer’s conservatorship care plan.
“He’s part of the problem,” Vigneault insisted of Federline. “One of the key parts of the conservatorship was Kevin’s involvement. They used the kids as bait to get Britney to work. They negotiated with Kevin to have full custody of the kids and use the kids to get Britney to work, saying, ‘If you want to see your kids, you’ve got to do this show. If you want to see your kids, you’ve got to do this album.’
Regarding ongoing concerns about Spears’ mental health, Vigneault cited a trip Spears took to Mexico this spring, which she documented on Instagram. “If she was in really bad shape and unstable, she would have done something outrageous in Cabo…The Mexican press would definitely have said something about it.”
However, TMZ reported at the time that Spears was in a “difficult state” and had to be asked by a flight attendant to put out a cigarette after drinking several alcoholic drinks on a charter flight from Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, to Los Angeles.
Vigneault also feels that, despite the claims in Federline’s book, Preston and Jaden have an obligation to help their mother if needed.
“If I were her child…I would try to help her,” Vigneault admitted, adding, “She’ll never be the Britney she was. She was 27 when her life was taken from her. She’ll never recover from that.”
