LOS ANGELES (AP) — Kevin Federline says he’s worried about his two sons Britney Spears long stopped him from telling his story, and those same concerns are why he tells it now that they are men.
In a memoir to be released Tuesday, “You Thought You Knew,” Federline documents her difficult years as a husband, ex-husband and co-parent with Spears, who wrote her own memoir in 2023.
Federline includes salacious stories and potentially disturbing details about his behavior that have previously made headlines.
“I want my children to be able to move forward in their lives and know that the truth about everything is out there,” Federline, 47, told The Associated Press in a Zoom interview, leaning against palm trees in Hawaii, where he now lives with his wife Victoria Prince and their two daughters. “That’s a very, very important part to me. And it’s really important that I share my story, so they don’t have to.”
He and Spears’ son Preston are now 20, and his brother Jayden is 19. They have little relationship with their mother.
Federline was a 26-year-old dancer for other major pop acts when he teamed up with Spears in 2004. Their courtship, two-year marriage and divorce took them through one of the most intense celebrity media frenzies in modern history. Federline was mercilessly roasted as a loser, especially after releasing his own deeply mocked hip-hop album.
“I wasn’t just famous, I was infamous,” he writes in the book, which will be published on new audiobook platform Listenin.
He told the AP that he had long considered writing the book, but had recently taken the subject seriously.
“I took it up and put it down several times over a period of probably five years,” he said. “I think it’s a very good description of me, of who I am, of the father that I have become, of the husband that I am, of the ex-husband that I am.”
Kevin Federline’s key revelations about Britney Spears
— Federline describes the night he and Spears first met at a Hollywood nightclub, and how they met a few hours later in a hotel bungalow: “Britney turned around, took off her underwear and started kissing me, tearing my clothes with both hands. We stumbled toward the bed while I struggled to get my pants off my ankles. It is. This is happening. Okay, sorry. Calm down, it’s as detailed as possible.”
— He writes that a “San Andreas-level seismic shift in my reality” followed hours later when he left the hotel with Spears and dozens of paparazzi cars followed them.
— He describes the night before their wedding, when Spears called her ex Justin Timberlakeseeking closure: “She never really got over him. She may have loved me, but there was something about Justin that she couldn’t let go.”
– Federline said seeing Spears drink while pregnant “set off the silent alarms in my head.” He later became outraged when he saw her doing cocaine while the boys were still breastfeeding, saying, “Are you seriously going to come home after this and feed them like you didn’t have a body full of drugs?”
— He writes that Preston told him that Spears mocked him mercilessly and once punched him in the face.
— He says the boys began refusing to visit him when they were 13 and 14, and later told him stories that “shook me to the core.” “They would sometimes wake up in the night to find her standing silently in the doorway, watching them sleep – ‘Oh, are you awake?’ – with a knife in his hand.
Spears’ response to Federline’s book
Spears replied with a statement on his social media accounts. She said Federline engaged in “constant lighting.”
“Believe me, these white lies in this book are going straight to the bank and I’m the only one who’s really hurt here.” She said, adding that “if you really know me, you won’t pay attention to the tabloids about my mental health and my drinking.”
She also spoke about her relationship with her sons:
“I always begged and screamed to have a life with my boys. Relationships with teenagers are complex. I felt demoralized by this situation and always asked and almost begged for them to be a part of my life. Unfortunately, they always witnessed (their) own father’s lack of respect for me.”
An attorney for Spears did not respond to a request for comment.
The life of Federline and reflections on the life of Spears
Federline writes about growing up in Fresno, California, and finding “my therapy and my purpose” through dance.
He remembers his first big tour, with Pink, and his collaboration with Aaliyah, Destiny’s Child and Michael Jackson. It details his fight with John Cena in WWE and his appearance in a self-deprecating Super Bowl commercial.
Federline says Preston and Jayden lived on their own as young adults and both worked to create music that made him proud.
It weighs on Spears’ dissolved legal conservatorshipsaying it was necessary but hurt most of those involved. He said the fans who fought to free her left an unfortunate legacy.
“The Free Britney movement may have started from a good place, but it has vilified everyone around her so intensely that it is now almost impossible for anyone to intervene,” he writes.
He says in the book that he wrote it in part as a public plea for more help.
“I have lost hope that things will completely change,” he wrote, “but I still hope that Britney can find peace.”
