Britney Spears Reveals Moment She Finally Decided to Cut Family Off

Britney Spears has revealed in her newly released memoir, The Woman in Me, the last straw that led to her cutting ties with her immediate family.

In recent years, the pop icon has spoken out against her family in a series of social media posts, particularly around the time that she sought to bring about an end to her 13-year conservatorship.

During the “Toxic” hitmaker’s conservatorship, her personal and financial decisions were taken out of her hands. The arrangement, which was implemented in 2008 amid mental health concerns, was overseen for several years by her father, Jamie Spears. A judge dissolved the conservatorship in November 2021.

On occasion, Britney Spears has lashed out at other family members—including her mother, Lynne Spears—accusing them of being complicit in her conservatorship. She has also taken swipes at her younger sister, Jamie Lynn Spears.

While she appears to have since softened her stance on her family, she wrote in her new book—which was published on Tuesday—that things came to a head when she traveled back to her Kentwood, Louisiana, hometown to visit them during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

“For the first months of lockdown, I became even more of a homebody than I already had been,” she said of her time alone at her California home. “I spent days, weeks, sitting in my room, listening to self-help audiobooks, sharing at the wall or making jewelry, bored out of my mind.”

Such were the strict conditions of her conservatorship, she said, that a trip to the beach turned sour when she removed her protective face mask.

“Security ran over to scold me,” she wrote. “I was reprimanded and grounded for weeks.”

“Because of the way quarantines were and his work schedule, I didn’t have Hesam [‘Sam’ Asghari, her then-partner] with me. I was so lonely, I even got to missing my family,” she wrote. “I called my mom and said, ‘I want to see you guys.’ She said, ‘We’re shopping right now. Gotta go! We’ll call you later.’ And then they didn’t.”

On noticing how lockdown rules weren’t as strict in Louisiana and while continuing to pine for company, the “Princess of Pop” said that she eventually “gave up on getting on the phone and went to Louisiana to see them. They seemed so free there.”

At the time of traveling to see her family, she said that she was “still scared of them, and I wanted to make nice.” However, things soon turned sour.

“It was during this period of time with my family that I learned that while I’d been in my mental health facility, they’d thrown away a lot of what I’d had stored at my mother’s house,” she wrote in her memoir. “The Madame Alexander dolls I’d collected as a girl were all gone. So were three years’ worth of my writing. I had a binder full of poetry that had real meaning for me. All gone.

“When I saw the empty shelves, I felt an overwhelming sadness. I thought of the pages I’d written through tears. I never wanted to publish them or anything like that, but they were important to me. And my family had thrown them in the trash, just like they’d thrown me away.”

Eventually, the star wrote, she came to a realization that she could start again, telling herself: “I can get a new notebook, and I can start over. I’ve been through a lot. The reason why I’m alive today is because I know joy.”

“It was time to find God again,” she went on. “In that moment, I made peace with my family—by which I mean that I realized I never wanted to see them again, and I was at peace with that.”