Britney Spears apparently had some unfinished business before her wedding to Kevin Federline.
In his new memoir, You Thought You Knew, Federline, 47, claims Spears, 43, called her ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake the night before they walked down the aisle in 2004.
“We were staying in one of the bungalows at the Fairmont in Santa Monica. It was supposed to be our moment of calm before the storm. Just us, getting ready to take this next step in our lives,” Federline writes. “I remember jumping in the shower, and when I got out, she wasn’t in the room. I looked around, checked the balcony, nothing. Tried calling her. No answer. That’s when I walked out to the front of the bungalow.”
Federline recalls finding Spears “sitting out by the planters, leaning up against one of the brick walls that faced the street,” which he found odd.
“She was on the phone,” he writes. “I figured she was talking to her mom or her sister, so I went back to the room.”
However, when Spears returned to their bungalow, Federline noticed she had been crying.
“I asked her, ‘Are you OK? What was that about?’ She said she was talking to Justin,” he claims. “She said she needed to call him, to end one chapter of her life before starting a new one. You can imagine my shock, the night before we were supposed to get married. I told her straight up, ‘If you’re not ready to do this, we don’t have to. We don’t need to get married.'”
Immediately, Spears “insisted” the call to Timberlake, 44, “wasn’t about second thoughts or doubts,” according to Federline. Rather, the “Toxic” singer “wanted closure” with the ‘NSync alum, who broke up with her in 2002 after she admittedly cheated on him with their mutual choreographer Wade Robson.
“She said they hadn’t talked much since everything went down between them. And I believed her,” Federline writes.
That said, even after they said “I do,” Federline “could tell” Spears still “hadn’t fully moved on” from Timberlake. Federline swears he “wasn’t mad” about it at the time and even “understood” that Timberlake was Spears’ first love, but after reading the Princess of Pop’s 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me, in which she candidly looked back on her teenage heartbreak, he realized she “never really got over” the “SexyBack” singer.
“She might’ve loved me, but there was always something there with Justin that she couldn’t let go of,” Federline muses.
In response to Federline’s press tour for his upcoming memoir, You Thought You Knew, Spears’ rep said in a statement to Us Weekly on Tuesday, October 14, “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.”
Us has also reached out to Timberlake’s rep for comment.
Spears and Federline welcomed their two sons, Preston, 20, and Jayden, 19, before separating in 2006. They finalized their divorce in 2007.
Spears was most recently married to Sam Asghari from 2022 to 2024. Federline, for his part, wed Victoria Prince in 2013, and they share two daughters: Jordan, 14, and Peyton, 11. Timberlake, meanwhile, tied the knot with Jessica Biel in 2012, and they have two sons: Silas, 10, and Phineas, 5.
You Thought You Knew is available in bookstores next Tuesday, October 21.
