LOS ANGELES — Kevin Federline says concern for his two sons with Britney Spears long kept him from telling his story, and those same concerns are the reason he’s telling it now that they’re men.
In a memoir to be released Tuesday, “You Thought You Knew,” Federline documents his difficult years as husband, ex-husband, and co-parent with Spears, who wrote her own memoir in 2023.
Federline’s includes some salacious stories and some potentially disturbing details about her behavior that have already made headlines.
“I want my children to be able to move forward in their lives and know that the actual truth of everything is out there,” Federline, 47, told The Associated Press in a Zoom interview, backed by palm trees in Hawaii, where he now lives with wife Victoria Prince and their two daughters. “That’s a very, very big part of this for me. And it’s really important that I share my story, so they don’t have to.”
He and Spears’ son Preston is now 20 and his brother Jayden is 19. They have little relationship with their mother.
Federline was a 26-year-old backup dancer for other major pop acts when he coupled with Spears in 2004. Their courtship, two-year marriage and divorce took them through one of the most intense celebrity media frenzies in modern history. Federline was ruthlessly roasted as a loser hanger-on, especially after he released his own deeply mocked hip-hop album.
“I wasn’t just famous — I was infamous,” he writes. He told the AP he long considered writing the book, but recently got serious about it.
“I picked it up and put it down quite a lot over probably a five-year period,” he said. “I think that it’s a very good description of me, who I am, the father I’ve become, the husband I am, the ex-husband I am.”
Key revelations from Kevin Federline about Britney Spears
— Federline describes the night he and Spears first connected at a Hollywood nightclub, and how they hooked up hours later in a hotel bungalow: “Britney turned around, slipped off her underwear and started kissing me, tearing at my clothes with both hands. We stumbled toward the bed while I struggled to kick my pants off my ankles. This. Is. Happening. OK, sorry. Calm down, that’s as detailed as I’m going to get.”
— He writes that a “San Andreas-level seismic shift in my reality” followed a few hours later when he left the hotel with Spears and dozens of paparazzi cars followed them.
— He describes the night before their wedding, when Spears called her ex Justin Timberlake, seeking closure: “She never really got over him. She might’ve loved me, but there was something there with Justin that she couldn’t let go of.”
— Federline said seeing Spears drinking while pregnant “tripped the silent alarms in my head.” He later was outraged when he saw her doing cocaine when the boys were still breastfeeding, saying “are you seriously going to go home after this and feed them like you don’t have a body full of drugs?”
— He writes that Preston told him Spears mercilessly mocked him and once punched him in the face.
— He says the boys began refusing to visit her when they were 13 and 14, and later told him stories that “shook me to the core.” “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.”
