Britney Spears has revealed that she felt like her family was trying to kill her throughout her 13-year conservatorship.
In a new excerpt of her memoir, The Woman in Me, obtained by Time, the pop icon admitted that she was restrained by her family and taken to the hospital following a 2008 incident where she locked herself in a bathroom with her son, Jayden, because she was worried she’d never see her boys again. After that, her father, Jamie Spears, filed the papers to enter her into her conservatorship.
“At various times I pushed back, especially when my father took away access to my cell phone,” she wrote in the book. “I would be smuggled a private phone and try to break free. But they always caught me.”
She continued, “And here’s the sad, honest truth: After everything I had been through, I didn’t have a lot of fight left in me. I was tired, and I was scared, too. After being held down on a gurney, I knew they could restrain my body any time they wanted to. They could’ve tried to kill me, I thought. I started to wonder if they did want to kill me.”
When her father took control of her life, she explained that she felt her spirit retreat from her body, causing her to go on autopilot and hoping that if she played along, they would let her live her life how she wanted to. “I didn’t see a way out,” she wrote.
A decade later, Spears again felt like her life was in jeopardy when Jamie Spears forced her to check into a Beverly Hills rehab program and told her if she didn’t cooperate he would take her to court and make her “look like a fucking idiot.” She went to rehab, and when she reached out to her sister, Jamie Lynn Spears, for help, the Zoey 101 star allegedly texted back, “Stop fighting it.”
“Along with the rest of them, she kept acting like I was a threat in some way,” Spears added. “This will sound crazy, but I’ll say it again because it’s the truth: I thought they were going to try to kill me.”
After months in rehab, Spears shared that she returned home and her family insisted on being around her. She explained that she was a shell of a human and still on lithium, which made things hazy.
“It crossed my mind that they were only visiting to finish off what they’d started a few months earlier, to kill me for real,” she wrote. “If that sounds paranoid, consider all the things I’d been through up until this point — the ways in which they had deceived and institutionalized me.”
In other excerpts of the memoir published in the week leading up to its official release, Spears has revealed that she had an abortion while she was with Justin Timberlake and how her interview with Diane Sawyer following her breakup with the NSYNC frontman was a “breaking point” for her.
The Woman in Me hits shelves Oct. 24.