In an excerpt from her upcoming memoir “The Woman In Me” shared by People, Britney Spears explains why she shaved all of her hair off in 2007 following an incident with paparazzi.
“I’d been eyeballed so much growing up. I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager,” she writes. “Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back.”
During the time she shaved her head, which happened in February 2007, Spears had other concerning public incidents, including hitting a photographer’s car with an umbrella and driving with one of her infant sons on her lap. The previous year, Spears had filed for divorce from her husband Kevin Federline. Following Spears’ apparent breakdowns, Federline fought for and was awarded full custody of their two sons.
Spears was placed under a “temporary conservatorship” in 2008 after multiple stays in rehab and being committed to a psychiatric hospital twice. The legal arrangement, which gave Spears’ father, Jamie Spears, and a lawyer control over Spears’ estate, financial assets, and some personal matters, lasted for 13 years until Judge Brenda Penny ended it in November 2021.
In her memoir, the “Overprotected” singer also writes about living under the rules of the conservatorship she previously called “abusive.”
“I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take,” she writes in another excerpt published by People.
Spears writes in her memoir that it made her “sick” that her father and other men had control of her body, and explains that while living under their rules, she lost her passion for performing.
“I would do little bits of creative stuff here and there, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. As far as my passion for singing and dancing, it was almost a joke at that point,” she writes. “Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself.”
