In her revealing memoir The Woman in Me, Britney Spears opens up about the false public image that was carefully crafted for her at the height of her fame. One of the most persistent narratives pushed by her management and publicity team was that she was a virgin—a portrayal Spears says was both untrue and damaging.
She explains that early in her career, her team made a conscious decision to present her as sexually innocent, regardless of what was actually true in her private life. “If you’re young and single in Hollywood, if there’s even a rumor that you’ve had sex, you’re labelled a slut,” Spears wrote. “So my team created this whole narrative around me.” The singer says she went along with it at first, understanding it as part of the price of fame.
Despite being in a high-profile relationship with Justin Timberlake, Spears says she was encouraged to pretend she had only recently lost her virginity to him. “My managers and press people had long tried to portray me as an eternal virgin—never mind that Justin Timberlake and I had been living together, and I’d been having sex since I was fourteen,” she revealed.
The pop star described how this false image followed her even after her split with Timberlake in 2002. In a 2003 interview, she still claimed the first time she had sex was two years into her relationship with him, a statement she now admits was a lie shaped by industry pressure. In reality, Spears says she first had sex as a teenager with her brother Bryan’s best friend.
This constructed identity didn’t just misrepresent her—it caused real pain. Spears shared one of the most harrowing moments of her relationship with Timberlake, when she had an abortion in secret to avoid media scrutiny. She recalled staying at home, “sobbing and screaming” in agony on the bathroom floor, with Timberlake trying to soothe her by playing guitar. She was too afraid of press exposure to go to a hospital.
The ongoing pressure to maintain this fake persona took a toll. Spears questioned why her team was so determined to maintain the image of her as a virginal pop princess. “Why did my managers work so hard to claim I was some kind of young-girl virgin even into my twenties? Whose business was it if I’d had sex or not?”
In The Woman in Me, Spears reflects on how this imposed image was a form of control. “I was being shamed like I hadn’t followed the script,” she writes, even though the script itself had been entirely fabricated. She admits that being marketed as “the eternal virgin” left her feeling disconnected from her real identity.
Her memoir also covers the wider context of control that defined much of her adult life, particularly the 13-year conservatorship she was placed under from 2008 to 2021. After regaining her freedom, Spears says she is still struggling with the emotional damage, admitting it is “extremely hard” to come to terms with what her family and team subjected her to.