Kevin Federline’s new memoir complicates the ‘Free Britney’ legacy

Nearly four years ago, on a cloudless Friday afternoon in downtown Los Angeles, the 13-year conservatorship saga of Britney Spears was declared officially over.

The storyline had been in the news for months, largely thanks to the efforts of the “Free Britney” movement, and I was one of a dozen or so reporters who sprinted out of the hearing room at Stanley Mosk Courthouse that day to dial their editors or whip out their laptops.

Later on, as Spears’ attorney, Mathew Rosengart, approached a lectern outside the courthouse to deliver a victorious statement to the press, he had to wait for hundreds of Free Britney folks to stop chanting: “Rosen-god! Rosen-god!”

By this point, much of the public believed that the conservatorship — which gave control of Spears’ person and her finances to a conservator (her father, Jamie Spears) — was being unfairly weaponised against Spears.

She was an adult with a career, many reasoned, and entitled like most other adults to her own money and time.

As I read Spears’ ex-husband Kevin Federline’s new book, the aptly titled You Thought You Knew, I thought again of those activists outside Mosk Courthouse, fervently celebrating a development whose ramifications would touch almost none of them.

Federline, by contrast, was directly affected — and up close, he alleges, it was all much less triumphant.

The memoir, out Tuesday via the audio-first publisher Listenin (but in text form as well), finds Federline feeling as though he’s finally worked up the nerve to tell his side of the story.

He chronicles his early life and the origins of his dance career in Fresno, California; his three-year marriage to Spears at the height of her popularity; and the fallout in the years since their divorce, making a few startling allegations about their relationship along the way.

Ultimately, though, the book seems determined to hammer one message home: Once her struggles with mental illness began, Federline alleges, Spears was frequently a danger to her two sons, Jayden and Preston (now legal adults at 19 and 20, hence the timing of the book), and made little effort to change.

Federline describes the conservatorship era as some of the more peaceful years of their co-parenting and alleges that its dissolution made way for “history repeating itself” and for Spears to start lashing out at their sons, unsupervised and sometimes publicly.

In doing so, Federline convincingly complicates the putative victories of the Free Britney movement, as well as its legacy.

Conversational throughout, Federline makes a charming enough narrator, save for a few weirdly mangled metaphors (Britney “beat to her own drum,” occasional drug use helped him “drown out all the chaff”).

He comes across as someone who’s well aware he’s exceeded those sweet, sweet 15 minutes of fame and determined not to squander his opportunity to say his piece.

So in addition to getting his message out about Spears, he acknowledges all the dance coaches and bodyguards and nannies and mentors and family members who helped him along the way and got him out of jams, and even shouts out the people who partied with him on particularly memorable, wild occasions. (“You’re my boy, Eli,” he writes, name-dropping the NFL quarterback Eli Manning. “Sorry, but I’ve always wanted to say that.”)

When Federline introduces new allegations against his ex-wife, though, his tone turns sombre and measured.

He alleges that Spears’ erratic conduct and mental health troubles began after the births of their two sons in 2005 and 2006. He writes that Spears breastfed the babies immediately after abusing drugs and lashed out when he pleaded with her to give them formula instead.

He describes bizarre home intrusions and alleges that Spears accused him of abusing their children during her involuntary psychiatric hold, which resulted in the two boys getting emergency medical welfare checks that frightened them.

Federline also chronicles an infamous 2008 scandal in which Spears allegedly locked herself in a bathroom with Jayden when Federline’s security team came to pick the boys up from her house.

It’s well known to those familiar with the Free Britney lore as the inciting incident for Spears’s involuntary hospitalisation and subsequent conservatorship — but it’s here contextualised as part of a pattern.

“This whole saga, twenty years of it, was built on denial. Britney never reached the first step of recovery: admitting there was a problem,” Federline writes. “From the bathroom incident with Jayden to reckless choices like partying when she was supposed to be parenting, it was always someone else’s fault.”

Into their preteen and teen years, Jayden and Preston were subjected to disturbing, abusive treatment in the time they spent with their mother, Federline alleges.

He claims Spears made at least one son bathe with her, often abandoned the older Preston in favour of one-on-one time with the younger Jayden, sometimes woke Jayden up in the middle of the night to keep her company and other times stood silently in the doorway of their bedrooms holding a knife.

He claims Preston told him Spears once punched him in the face. The boys eventually told Federline they no longer wanted to visit Spears, he writes.

But after the conservatorship was dissolved, Federline alleges, she began calling the two boys’ cellphones to berate them at unpredictable hours, and criticising them on social media.

“I understand why people questioned it,” Federline writes of the conservatorship. “It’s easy to judge when you’re not living it.” And perhaps, he adds, the arrangement could have better served everyone “if (Spears’s father and conservator) Jamie had handed off the conservatorship to a professional much earlier.”

(Jamie Spears did so in September 2021, officially ceding the role to professional fiduciary Jodi Montgomery, who had been acting as temporary conservator since 2019.)

Still, Federline maintains that Jamie “took on an impossible task, and in doing so, gave Britney a real chance to rebuild her relationship with our sons,” and Montgomery did “a helluva job”.

You Thought You Knew eventually becomes the cri de coeur of a misunderstood family man as Federline turns his attention directly to the reader.

“From where I sit, the clock is ticking, and we’re getting close to the eleventh hour,” he writes. “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.

They love their mom. They’ve seen the red flags. But they don’t know how to help without being attacked, misunderstood, or blamed.”

“The Free Britney movement got it wrong,” he adds. “All those people who put so much effort into that should now put the same energy into the Save Britney movement. Because this is no longer about freedom. It’s about survival.”

Spears addressed the book on X last week. “I have always pleaded and screamed to have a life with my boys,” she wrote. “Relationships with teenage boys is complex. I have felt demoralised by this situation and have always asked and almost begged for them to be a part of my life.”

“I 100 percent beg to differ the way he is literally attacking me in his interviews,” Spears wrote in another X post the next day. “If you really love someone then you don’t help them by humiliating them.” (A representative for Spears did not respond to a request for comment.)

Plus, Spears wrote her own memoir in 2023 and gave statements in court during her conservatorship hearings. Her family members, on occasion, have spoken out too.

But it’s futile for an outside observer to try to suss out which of these accounts depict things as they actually transpired; what goes on behind the scenes among the fractured family and those in its orbit is witnessed by almost no one.

Still, You Thought You Knew does match the existing Spears mythology in that it’s yet another testament to the devastating power of the 2000s fame machine notorious for chewing up and spitting out young women.

It’s especially sobering, I would argue, to hear about it from a supporting character, whose life got caught in its gears by association.

Over and over throughout You Thought You Knew, Federline emphasises what an exceedingly strange and often traumatising young adulthood his ex-wife endured, cameras invading every moment of her day and reporters prodding around in every aspect of her personal life.

Zoom out from the comparisons between his account and hers, and what’s clear is that Federline’s story is one more voice in a growing chorus condemning the celebrity culture of the early 21st century, urging us to learn from it.