Britney Spears will accuse Justin Timberlake of cheating on her in her forthcoming, much-anticipated memoir, The Woman in Me, according to a new report.
The revelation will upend the established narrative of the defining pop culture relationship of the millennial era and could nudge pop anthropologists to a new understanding of the breakdown.
It has long been the argument of the organs of the all-powerful industrial celebrity gossip nexus of the time, to wit, People magazine, Page Six and Us Weekly, that the couple split after Spears, now 41, cheated on Timberlake, now 42, a theorem given weight by their subsequent chart hits.
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Timberlake was first to monetize the breakup with 2002’s “Cry Me a River,” which contained the lyric, “You don’t have to say, what you did / I already know / I found out from him / Now there’s just no chance / For you and me.”
Spears responded in 2003 with “Everytime,” which seemed to cop to the accusations from her former Mousketeer, with lyrics such as: “What have I done?... Please forgive me / My weakness caused you pain / And this song’s my sorry.”
However, what seemed to be an open and shut case may now be revisited, after TMZ reported that Spears writes in her new memoir, which comes out next week, that Timberlake cheated on her with an unnamed celebrity. There is no reason to doubt TMZ’s sources, as it was the first to report Tuesday’s big bombshell, that Timberlake pushed for an abortion that Spears didn’t want when she got pregnant at 19.
As The Daily Beast reported Tuesday, Spears writes that the NSYNC star “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 adds: “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.”
In the wake of that revelation, some fans are now speculating that “Everytime” is actually a meditation on her abortion, pointing to lines such as, “Every time I see / You in my dreams / I see your face / You’re haunting me / I guess I need you baby,” and a video that includes idyllic scenes of a child being born.
All in all, then, it’s fair to say Spears has gone pretty scorched earth on her former lover, whom she met on the set of The Mickey Mouse Club in 1992 before they became the towering colossi of pop culture at the turn of the millennium.
One act of grace stands out, however. TMZ reports: “Britney doesn’t name the person with whom Justin allegedly stepped out, saying the woman now has a family Brit doesn’t want to embarrass... which means fans will, inevitably, start trying to connect dots on their own.”
In case Timberlake’s in any doubt what he is going to be dealing with for the next few weeks, well, as the woman said: It’s Britney, bitch.
