Britney Spears Reveals Abortion with Justin Timberlake’s Baby 20 Years Ago

One of the many revelations Britney Spears makes in her upcoming book, The Woman In Me, involves her old flame Justin Timberlake and a secret she’s been keeping for nearly 20 years.

Featured on the cover of People magazine, which published the first excerpts from the book inside its pages, Britney has revealed that when she and Timberlake were together back in the early 2000s, she had an abortion after becoming pregnant with his baby.

“It was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy. I loved Justin so much. I always expected us to have a family together one day. This would just be much earlier than I’d anticipated,” Spears writes of the pregnancy in the book. “But Justin definitely 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.”

“If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it,” she went on to say. “And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father.” Noting that “to this day” the experience of undergoing the abortion has been “one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life.”

“I’m finally free to tell my story,” Spears told People via email. “It is finally time for me to raise my voice and speak out, and my fans deserve to hear it directly from me. No more conspiracy, no more lies — just me owning my past, present and future.”

Also in the book, due out October 24, Spears writes about her rise on Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club, her iconic 2001 VMAs performance, the pain she endured throughout her conservatorship, and so much more.