Britney Spears didn’t feel like the Queen of Vegas when she was performing her much-lauded Las Vegas residency, and was under the total control of her father, Jamie Spears, she writes in her new memoir, The Woman in Me.
In the book, which hit shelves Tuesday, she divulges that she was secretly sent to rehab in 2014 and 2019 for her use of over-the-counter energy supplements. She writes that her boyfriend at the time, Charlie Ebersol, introduced her to them, and that they’d helped her keep up her energy while she performed her show.
The residency began just after Christmas 2013, when she sums up her life as such: “I had two kids. I’d had a breakdown. My parents had taken over my career. What was I going to do at this point, just go home? So I went along with it. I went to Vegas the way everyone goes to Vegas—hoping to win.”
She writes that, as part of Ebersol’s fitness routine, he took energizing pre-workout supplements and vitamins, and he shared his research and supplements with her. Taking them, she said she “had more energy onstage and was in better shape than I had been.”
As her legal conservator, however, her father, Jamie Spears, “didn’t like that.”
“It seemed obvious that Charlie’s regimens were a good thing for me,” Spears writes. “But I believe my father started to think that I had a problem with those energy supplements, even though they were over-the-counter, not prescription. So he told me I had to get off them, and he sent me to rehab.”
Earlier in the book, Spears admits to taking Adderall, and at one point writes, “I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I was hell on wheels. I was taking a lot of Adderall.”
And so, off to rehab Spears went, fearing that she’d lose access to her two young sons if she didn’t, and having no legal power of her own.
“He got to say where I went and when,” she said of her father. “And going to rehab meant that I didn’t get to see my kids for a whole month. The only consolation was that I knew it was just for a month and I’d be done.”
At her Malibu rehab, she writes, “a lot of people at the facility were serious drug addicts. I was scared to be there by myself. At least I was allowed to have a security guard, who I’d have lunch with every day.”
Spears said that she saw her father as “selling himself as this amazing guy and devoted grandfather when he was throwing me away, putting me against my will into a place with crack and heroin addicts. I’ll just say it—he was horrible.”
When she was released, she writes, “I started doing shows again in Vegas like nothing had happened.”
She describes the absolute lack of control she had in her life, down to what she could eat. “For two years, I ate almost nothing but chicken and canned vegetables,” she writes. Despite that, she gained weight. “I’ll be honest, I was fucking miserable.”