Kevin Federline says he finally realised his marriage to Britney Spears was irreparable the night she rang him up begging him to come and join the party – as their two young children cried in the background.
‘I was in Miami for work, trying to stay focused on my commitments, and I got a call,’ the pop superstar’s second husband recalls.
‘It was her, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan on the line, drunk as hell, begging me to come over. I could hear Preston and Jayden crying in the background. It had to be three or four in the morning.’
It was November 2006, Spears had only just filed for divorce and the phone call was the ‘final straw’, writes Federline in a startling new memoir.
‘I’d already seen the photos in the tabloids, the ones of her out with them all night, partying at Paris’s Malibu place,’ he recalls in You Thought You Knew, an excoriating account of his life with the troubled ‘Princess of Pop’ and her terrifying, chaotic behaviour as a wife and mother.
‘But hearing my kids crying while she was doing God-knows-what? That was it. Any deep-seated sliver of hope that I’d held on to, that we might still somehow pull it together for the kids, died right then.’
Those same children, he reveals, would later tell him they would sometimes awaken at night to find their mother ‘standing silently in the doorway, watching them sleep… with a knife in her hand’.
On other occasions, Federline – who got many of the stories second-hand from the children – says the hot-tempered Spears punched one of them in the face and threatened him with a knife.
Kevin Federline (left) has revealed he finally realised his marriage to Britney Spears (right) was over) when she begged him to come to a party while their children cried in the background
Federline says the hot-tempered Spears (pictured almost dropping her baby Sean Preston in 2006) punched one of her children in the face and threatened him with a knife
Spears (pictured) has recently been posting bizarre scantily-clad footage of herself dancing
When they were babies, he claims, she was determined to breastfeed them after drinking and snorting cocaine.
Federline, one of Spears’s former backing dancers, was married to her from 2004 to 2007 – after her first burst of stardom had waned – and was later granted sole custody of their children.
In a relentlessly shocking book, Federline, now 47, claims Spears, 43, routinely endangered the young boys as she struggled with mental illness.
He delivers a powerful rejoinder to the widespread perception – championed fiercely by fans and supporters in the ‘Free Britney Movement’ – that the singer was the victim of a terrible injustice when she was placed in a 13-year conservatorship by a court alarmed by the state of her mental health.
Under the terms of the order, her father, Jamie, was given control of her person and her money.
Although he acknowledges it was difficult for all involved, Federline insists the conservatorship period, which lasted from 2008 to 2021 and was so restrictive that Spears even needed permission to redecorate her kitchen, actually ‘brought stability when it was desperately needed’.
However, he continues, Spears has crucially never admitted she has ‘a problem’, and so her erratic behaviour hasn’t stopped.
Fellow diners at the Red-O restaurant in Thousand Oaks, California, would probably agree after Wednesday night’s performance. Footage obtained by the Daily Mail showed an apparently intoxicated Spears raise a glass in a bizarre toast to the entire restaurant. Later, taking the wheel of her black BMW despite the protests of friends, she drove home, a journey of U-turns, sharp accelerations and spells on the wrong side of the road.
‘That refusal to take responsibility is the root of everything that’s gone wrong,’ says Federline. ‘She saw the events in her life through a prism that painted her as the victim, the misunderstood one, the person wronged by everyone around her.’
He believes the dissolution of the conservatorship, after a judge ruled it ‘no longer required’, made way for ‘history repeating itself’.
Federline insists the Free Britney Movement ‘got it wrong’ and ‘vilified everyone around [Spears] so intensely that now it’s nearly impossible for anyone to step in’. Since the conservatorship ended, ‘it’s become impossible to pretend everything’s OK,’ he says, describing her situation as ‘racing toward something irreversible’.
Federline concludes: ‘Something bad is going to happen if things don’t change, and my biggest fear is that our sons will be left holding the pieces.’
Federline claims that when their children were babies, Spears (pictured at Cannes in 2004) was determined to breastfeed them after drinking and snorting cocaine
Federline (right) a former backing dancer for Spears (left), was married to her from 2004 to 2007
Federline claims Spears (pictured performing in 2001) routinely endangered their young boys as she struggled with mental illness
Friends of Spears last month expressed concern for her mental state after she posted a bizarre video of herself dancing in her mansion home, the floor littered with dog faeces. She has previously posted videos and photos in which she’s been completely naked or dancing with sharp knives.
Federline’s long-delayed version of events – he was reportedly once bound by a non-disclosure agreement which has now expired – is also significant for contradicting Britney’s self-pitying version of events in her own memoir, published two years ago.
In The Woman In Me, now being made into a film, Spears insisted she ‘never had a drinking problem’ and the only drug she’d ever abused – although not heavily – was Adderall, an amphetamine given to children with ADHD.
On that notorious night when she and close friend Hilton went out with Lohan, she admits she got ‘wasted’ while her mother, Lynne, took care of her young boys. Spears wrote: ‘I’d had her babysit so I could go out responsibly, without the kids seeing their mother under the influence.’
Federline, who has six children from three relationships, won sole custody of the two sons he had with Britney – now 20 and 19 – after she filed for divorce in 2006, leading to a protracted fight over the children. Spears has now accused Federline of ‘constant gaslighting’. She suggests he is trying to profit from their connection with a book that was only published after she stopped paying him child support.
According to Spears, the contents of Federline’s memoir have further strained her relationship with their two children, one of whom, she claims, she has only seen for a total of 45 minutes in the past five years. Spears denies that she is an erratic mother – although she has not denied Federline’s specific claims.
‘To be loved unconditionally and with a naive heart like mine, always being threatened or made to believe I’m the bad one as they profit off my pain,’ she tweeted last week before the book was published.
‘If you really love someone then you don’t help them by humiliating them. What scared me was how serious and angry he got, people have no idea, it is way worse than anyone could imagine.’
Federline’s account of life with Spears might also fall into the category of ‘way worse than anyone could imagine’.
He describes how their relationship started one night when Spears – who had her first big hit, Baby One More Time, aged 16 – invited him back to her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel where she took him into her bedroom and started kissing him, ‘tearing at my clothes with both hands’.
When he abruptly ended his relationship with his fiancee, actress Sharisse Jackson, while she was pregnant with their second child so he could join Spears on tour in Europe, Federline was branded a ‘gold-digger’.
In Amsterdam, where the Britney entourage occupied the entire floor of a hotel, Federline says he once walked in on the singer ‘full-on making out’ with one of her female dancers.
Friends of Spears last month expressed concern for her mental state after she posted a bizarre video of herself (above) dancing in her mansion home, the floor littered with dog faeces
Federline (left) insists the Free Britney Movement around his ex-wife (right) ‘got it wrong’
Shocked, he packed his bags. But Spears persuaded him to stay. As they flew back to New York after the European leg of the tour, the star proposed to him.
Three months after they’d first met, they got engaged. Five months later, they were married.
On the night before their wedding in Los Angeles, Federline says he found Spears on the phone to her ex-boyfriend, the singer Justin Timberlake.
Spears and Timberlake, who had first met as children on an American TV show, The Mickey Mouse Club, embarked on a high-profile romance in 1999. It broke up three years later amid accusations of infidelity on both sides.
‘[Britney] said she needed to call him, to end one chapter of her life before starting a new one,’ comments Federline, adding that, even after the wedding, ‘I could see that part of her heart still had ties to him’.
Federline says his wife’s decision to drink alcohol while pregnant and on medication ‘tripped the first silent alarm in my head’. But he kept making excuses for her, such as the pressure of fame. Her moods swung wildly, says Federline, who claims she once slapped him in the face while holding their baby son Preston in her arms.
In October 2006, Spears and an unnamed actress unexpectedly attended the release party for Federline’s new album – he was trying to launch his own music career as a rapper – despite their second child, Jayden, having been born little more than a month earlier.
‘They were sitting around the coffee table in my dressing room,’ said Federline. ‘The first thing I saw was Britney and her young starlet friend snorting a fat line of coke off the table… It was surreal. They didn’t even try to hide it.’
Federline said he tried to remonstrate with her when it became clear she intended to go home and breastfeed the babies (who, born 12 months apart, were both still nursing). She threw her drink in his face and stormed off.
Although her behaviour had ‘spiralled’ out of control to the point he had resolved to leave, Spears beat him to it, filing for a divorce that was formalised in 2007.
But even after doing that, he says, she would ‘bombard’ him with late-night calls ‘drunk, with the sound of my kids crying in the background’ – including that notorious episode with Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.
And her behaviour continued to unravel, he says. During their remorseless custody battle, Federline’s nanny went to collect Jayden – by then a year-old – from Spears’s home, to discover that she had locked herself away in a bathroom with the child and was refusing to give him up.
On the night before their wedding in Los Angeles, Federline (right) says he found Spears (left) on the phone to her ex-boyfriend, the singer Justin Timberlake
Spears (pictured during the 2007 MTV awards) persuaded Federline to stay after he allegedly walked in on the singer ‘full-on making out’ with one of her female dancers
Police were called and, after a three-hour stand-off, the singer was eventually put in a straitjacket and taken away strapped to a gurney. Officers had to ‘prize’ Jayden from her arms.
Spears was committed, against her will, to a psychiatric hospital.
She turned up one day to the custody hearing wearing her wedding dress, and another time she delayed proceedings for an hour while she drove round and round the court building.
‘For me, it was painful to watch,’ said Federline. ‘This wasn’t the person I’d fallen in love with, the person I’d built a family with.’
Initially, Spears continued to have her little boys over to stay at least once or twice a week and, says Federline, the pair would later recount horror stories which left them emotionally scarred.
In 2010, Fernando Flores, a security guard who worked for Spears when the boys were toddlers, sued her for sexual harassment, saying his ‘unkempt’ and unsanitary employer would have sex in front of him and repeatedly exposed herself to him.
He also said the children had been hit with a belt and left unsupervised. At the time, Federline publicly dismissed the claims (which ended in a confidential settlement). But now he says he’s not so sure.
As well as feeding Jayden shellfish despite his allergy, ‘brushing off concerns like it wasn’t a big deal’, Spears would regularly take him riding despite his ‘severe allergies’ to horses, he says. According to Federline, the singer’s disturbing and abusive treatment of their children continued for years.
Jayden, the younger and her favourite of the two, told his father that Spears would wake him in the middle of the night to keep her company.
On one occasion, both boys came home from a visit to their mother with their hair bleached down to their scalps and their skin burned from the chemicals.
‘Preston was about ten or 11 when he came to me, asking why his mom kept forcing him to bathe with her,’ Federline recalls. ‘It was clear he was uncomfortable, to put it mildly, and I had to step in and make it stop.’
By the time they had reached their teens, the pair didn’t want to visit her home any more, he says. Only when they had stopped seeing her did they tell him the most shocking stories.
‘They would awaken sometimes at night to find her standing silently in the doorway, watching them sleep – ‘Oh, you’re awake?’ – with a knife in her hand. Then she’d turn around and pad off without explanation. Creepy as f***. Other nights, they’d wake to the sound of her screaming bloody murder or smashing things in the house. All of this terrified them.’
Federline moved to Hawaii in 2023 with the boys and his new wife, Victoria Prince.
He says he hasn’t spoken to Spears ‘in years’. That hasn’t stopped him knowing, however, that he has to ‘sound the alarm’ about her – although he clearly fears it may already be too late.
