It’s not, by any means, the hottest take in the literary world to say, “Gee, a lot of Kevin Federline’s memoir was about Britney Spears, huh?” Federline and Spears married in September 2004 after a whirlwind courtship of just a few months. Two years and two kids later, Spears filed for divorce.
Federline is now 47 years old, but damn if that brief marriage nearly two decades back doesn’t take up the majority of ink in You Thought You Knew, his new memoir, which hit shelves Tuesday. Not only does the 228-page tome provide plenty of insight into what Federline thinks of his ex-wife’s past and current mental state, it’s a remarkable case study of he-said, she-said hypocrisy. Federline and ghostwriter Alex Holstein, editor-in-chief of boutique publisher Listenin, deliver a tale of a man who feels he’s been wronged by a woman, while engaging in some of the same behaviors he demonizes her for.
Federline told Vanity Fair that the book in which he accuses his ex-wife of doing hard drugs while breastfeeding their children, shares details of their intimate encounters, and openly questions whether her 13-year legal conservatorship should have been lifted, is in pursuit of a better life for Spears.
“I’m just trying to help,” he says. “This isn’t about hurting or bringing anybody down. It’s about trying to get to a place where it’s like, come on, there is still a path forward that involves you and the kids and people around you that love you, that want to bridge that gap.”
It’s OK when Kevin does it—for varying definitions of “it”—but not Britney. Spears published her own New York Times bestselling memoir, The Woman In Me, almost exactly two years ago. Federline makes appearances, though less prominently than the role she plays in his book. Federline says he has read her memoir, but he hesitated when asked if he felt it accurately depicted their time together.
“Look, I feel like she has the right to tell her story, and I don’t know how accurate all of it was, but I think a lot of people will stay silent on it because they just want to see her get better,” he tells VF. “Like I said, everybody has a right to tell their story.”
Spears has already publicly pushed back on Federline’s allegations. (He says he hasn’t heard from her directly: “I haven’t spoken to her in years. We haven’t been able to communicate like that for a long time.”) Before the book’s publication date, Spears wrote on X, “The constant gaslighting from ex-husband is extremely hurtful and exhausting. I have always pleaded and screamed to have a life with my boys.” She continued, “Relationships with teenage boys is complex. I have felt demoralized by this situation and have always asked and almost begged for them to be a part of my life.”
The two accounts agree on the circumstances of their first real meeting: a night out at Hollywood club that turned into a smaller group hang in the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Spears had a bungalow.
Here’s how Spears described it: “Kevin Federline was holding me. That’s the thing I remember best. We met at a club called Joseph’s Cafe in Hollywood, where I used to sit at a table in the back. Right away, from the moment I saw him, there was a connection between us—something that made me feel like I could escape everything that was hard in my life.”
On the other hand: “Honestly, at the time, in my twenty-five-year-old mind,” writes Federline, “I was just thinking about smashing that.”
According to Federline’s book, he told Spears that first night that he was already a father (“That’s cool,” he remembers her saying), but his recollection doesn’t mention what he said, if anything, about his then-partner being pregnant.
“I handled the breakup with Shar poorly,” he writes. By this, he means that he joined Spears on tour in Europe, but told his partner that “I’d booked a commercial shooting overseas.” He didn’t come clean about the situation until “it was too late. I had already let her piece together the truth on her own.” Also: There were paparazzi photos.
“Kevin had a ‘bad boy’ image,” Spears wrote. “Still, I had no idea when we met that he had a toddler, nor that his ex-girlfriend was eight months pregnant with his second baby. I was clueless. I was living in a bubble and I didn’t have a lot of good, close friends to confide in and get advice from. I had no idea until after we’d been together for a while and someone told me, ‘You know he has a new baby, right?’”
Federline quicksteps between talking about how he couldn’t imagine not being with his children to his need for escape from the very same.
“I’d head to Vegas for a couple nights or go up to stay with the boys just to breathe,” Federline writes. “It wasn’t like I was gone for weeks, but it was enough.”
A few months after their wedding, Spears is pregnant. She has a baby, Sean Preston, then is pregnant again, giving birth to the couple’s second son, Jayden James, just two days before the elder son’s first birthday.
Again and again, Federline tells us how his first priority was being physically with his children, then again and again describes not doing that. He spent weeks on the road promoting his debut rap album—ultimately a flop—which itself was released just six weeks after their second son was born.
Though he admits that he thought the album was “good enough” and that he “should’ve taken my time,” the poor reception hurt his feelings. “It wasn’t just some project I worked hard on; it was something I believed in,” he writes of his music. “I poured my heart into it, and when it didn’t perform the way I’d hoped, it hurt.”
Spears, too, wrote of Federline pursuing his passion for music.
“Sometimes I’d drop by the studio where he was working and it seemed like a clubhouse,” she wrote, describing her second pregnancy as a lonely time. “I could smell the weed wafting out of the studio door before I even walked in. ”
Knowing that her marriage is in trouble and seeing fame drifting ever higher on her then-husband’s priorities, she goes to Vegas to visit him when he moves there to record, dropping an all-time zinger in her recollection.
“When I found him, he had his head shaved. … He really thought he was a rapper now. Bless his heart—because he did take it so seriously.”
Not long after, in early November, Spears filed for divorce, saying that she was advised to do so to avoid humiliation. Federline claims he was blindsided, and that Spears had showed up to his release party unexpectedly and started doing cocaine, taking offense that he asked her not to breastfeed their children that night. “That’s what ended us,” he writes of what he repeatedly refers to as “the breastfeeding thing.”
“I remember hearing stories about her going out, partying until five in the morning, leaving the kids with nannies she barely knew. That killed me,” he writes. He discusses his quest for joint custody even as “I started going out more, drinking more, slipping up and doing coke now and then, anything to drown out all the chaff and escape the weight crushing me. No matter how dark things got, I kept pushing. Preston and Jayden were my anchor.”
On the same page as he talks about blowing coke and partying, he writes, “I was building a home for them, a safe space where they could be kids, out of the line of fire.” (Federline was eventually granted sole legal custody of the boys. Spears was required to pay child support.)
A few pages later, Federline describes a typical night without his kids: a “full-blown bacchanal bender of a first-rate Hollywood order, a journey through the underbelly of L.A.: strippers blowing cocaine in each other’s asses, guys tag-teaming chicks in my hot tub, a bordello masquerading as a porn studio masquerading as a dental office.”
He admits to VF that he can see how this might come off.
“I want people to know that I played a part in all of this as well, right?” he says. “I’m not pointing fingers here, and in the book, I’m saying these things because I was trying [to come] from a place of understanding. I understand that she was out partying. And I understand all of those things because I was doing them too. So I share the blame in that, 100%, you know? The difference is, I knew what was important to me with the kids, and I knew that whenever I had my kids, none of that was happening. Nothing was going on that would affect my parenting.”
It’s nonetheless hard not to cringe at Federline’s blatant double standards. Spears’ partying makes her an unfit parent, but Federline’s partying is self-care. He lambasts the online “Free Britney” movement and argues in favor of continued intervention for his ex-wife.
Federline has a defense for everything: Spears filed for divorce, but he had already left her in his heart. His album was a flop, but writes that he “couldn’t bring myself to put … out” other tracks he’d made with “Grammy-winning producers and songwriters.”
Now remarried and father to what he terms a “full six-pack” of children by three women, Federline tells VF that he shouldn’t be seen as the bad guy in Spears’ story—he’s just trying to help.
“I just hope she knows that there’s people out there that have been vilified, that actually really do care, people that know exactly what’s going on, and it doesn’t matter. There’s people that still care and people want to see greatness happen with her.”
He “absolutely” counts himself among those people: “I mean, who would I be as a father if I didn’t advocate for my sons’ mom?”
In a statement to the New York Times, a rep for Spears said, “With news from Kevin’s book breaking, once again he and others are profiting off her and sadly it comes after child support has ended with Kevin. All she cares about are her kids, Sean Preston and Jayden James, and their well-being during this sensationalism. She detailed her journey in her memoir.”
Representatives for Spears did not immediately respond to Vanity Fair’s requests for comment.
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