Kevin Federline Needs to Keep Britney Spears’ Name Out of His Mouth and Get a Real Job

Last November, Britney Spears achieved a historic victory when Los Angeles Superior Court judge Brenda Penny chose to drop out of her conservatory. After years of work by Spears herself, demonstrations from her most devoted fans, a harrowing documentary by The New York Timesand finally, the singer’s heartbreaking testimony in court, it seemed that Spears had finally won her freedom.

When Spears left her conservatory, the public and media responded with an avalanche of mea culpas. Documentary after documentary had shown how relentless professional pressure, combined with a tabloid culture devoid of empathy, had gradually but systematically broken the singer’s spirit. Viewers saw Spears’ 2008 public collapse in a new light—not as a personal failure to be cruelly ridiculed, as it was then, but as a cry for help from a human who had spent most of her life exploited for our entertainment.

Less than a year later, however, that old, familiar cruelty has already crept back into Spears’ discourse. For example, consider the conversation that unfolded in the wake of her ex-husband Kevin Federline’s recent insidious “revelations” about her.

On Monday, ITV began its three-part interview with the former Mr. Spears to tease. Federline said he believes the conservatory “saved” his ex-wife – this despite Spears’ own accusations that she was forced into years of “therapy” with practitioners she never chose (which isn’t therapy at all); that her meds were forcibly changed as “punishment” for canceling her Las Vegas domination residence; and that her conservators would not allow her to remove her IUD so she could have a child. (That last statement constitutes reproductive compulsionaccording to Alexis McGill Johnson, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.)

Still, Federline insisted: “Jamie Spears came up to me and was kind of like, I don’t know what to do, I want to help,” he told ITV. “I saw a man who really cared about his family and really cared about his family and wanted everything to be okay.” (It doesn’t matter that Jamie Spears reportedly lived on his daughter’s wealth for years, even before her conservatorship, further siphoning her finances to pay not just her own lawyers, but his.)

More insidious, however, was Federline’s decision to discuss Spears’ relationship with their two sons, Sean and Jayden, who are both still teenagers in high school. Federline suggested that Spears’ Instagram posts — in which she occasionally poses nude, censored with emojis — embarrassed their sons.

“I apologize to them, to them, to them because I can’t imagine what it feels like to be a teenager going to high school,” Federline said. “Who knows how many people ask them about it or talk to them about it?… I try to explain them, look, maybe [it’s] just another way she tries to express herself, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s hard what it does to them.”

Spears’ husband, Sam Asghari, responded to Federline’s comments with a statement noting, “Even if it were true that her children are ashamed of their mother’s choices and positive body image, they wouldn’t be the first teens to feel ashamed.” for their parents.”

Then Came the Most Explosive Comments: Federline Said Sean and Jayden “Don’t See” [Spears] not now” and “months” since they skipped her wedding this summer. “There were a lot of things going on that they weren’t comfortable with,” he said. “They made sure I knew what was going on… they started sending me videos and certain things that they liked, look, I’m telling you this happens.”

What exactly ‘this’ is remains unclear.

In a now expired statement on her Instagram story, Spears wrote: “I am saddened to hear that my ex-husband has decided to discuss the relationship between me and my children… As we all know, parenting is of teenage boys never easy for everyone. It worries me that the reason is based on my Instagram. It was LONG before Instagram. I gave them everything… Just one word: HURTFUL.” In a subsequent post, Spears called her sons “hateful” and claimed they never wanted to spend time with her during their visits.

That was all it took for Federline to double down. “I can’t sit back and let my sons accuse like this after what they’ve been through,” Federline said. (Apparently he forgot that it was his own interview about their children that prompted Spears’ comments.) “The lies have to stop,” Federline said. “I hope our kids grow up to be better than this.”

And so Federline shared a handful of supposedly disturbing videos on Instagram.

The videos don’t project exactly The Waltons energy, but they are far from destructive. In perhaps the most notable scene, one of the singer’s sons appears to be complaining that she confiscated his phone indefinitely to walk into an Alaskan ice cream parlor. The moment immediately reminded me of the time just before Spears’ collapse when a whole gossip saga sparked around pictures of her walking barefoot into a public restroom. The anecdote capitalized on the media’s already pervasive narrative that Spears, who had once been our favorite rags-to-riches story, was now an irredeemable “white trash.”

Federline deleted the videos. Spears’ attorney, Mathew Rosengart, has made a statement on behalf of his client.

“Britney has been faithful to her children and she loves them dearly,” the statement read in part. “Whether he realizes it or not, Mr. Federline has not only violated the privacy and dignity of the mother of his children, he has also undermined his own children, whose privacy he should protect.”

Rosengart added: “Putting aside his ITV interview, Mr Federline’s ill-advised decision to post an old video of his 11- and 12-year-old children was cruel. It was repulsive. In addition to humiliating himself and violating societal norms, he has now also created several legal issues for himself, including, but not limited to, implying cyberbullying and cyberbullying among others.

What really stands out, though, is how easily Federline threw us all back to 2009 — when Mommy Police Spears was one of the main concerns of the entertainment media.

It’s hard to imagine the positive motivation Federline and his family could have had for sharing these moments. If the concern is Sean and Jayden’s embarrassment, publishing these videos — even, as Federline seems to claim, with the children’s consent — will only increase the oversight of the family and further humiliate everyone. And if caring is Spears’ parenting skills… I mean, can anyone really believe that? this one is going to help?

ITV’s interviewer Daphne Barak, meanwhile, has said some of Federline’s interviews will not be broadcast in full because it is “too hurtful”.

Barak said ITV’s story, which appears to be centered on Federline but reportedly includes other family members, is about ‘fatherhood in the eye of the storm’.

“It’s this story about the father and the boys and how he managed to successfully confront them with all this drama that’s going on and still going on, as you see on Instagram. So basically it’s not Kevin vs Britney, it wasn’t about her, it was about his fatherhood and the whole family wanted it.”

Somehow I suspect Spears doesn’t belong with “all the family” – the only reason viewers would know the subject names in the first place. (No offense to Federline’s short-lived rap career.)

Meanwhile, Spears’ family and former connections — most of whom were allegedly complicit in her subjugation — continue to find media platforms to tell her story before she had a chance to do so herself. Lest we forget, her little sister, Jamie Lynn, has already drafted an all-encompassing memoir. Even some documentaries that supposedly advocate for the singer, such as Netflix’s Britney vs. Spears, take their cues from sources such as the attorney who helped remove Sean and Jayden from Spears’ custody. In the absence of Spears’ voice, and especially given everything we know about how the singer has been silenced thus far, these choices feel more than blatant; they are careless and cruel.

It also feels like no coincidence that so many of the critiques surrounding Spears, from her public nudity to her alleged fitness as a mother, are specifically gender-based. Spears’s conservatorship struggle, then and still is, is both a rights issue for people with disabilities and a startling demonstration of misogyny. That coerced IUD, like conservatives’ relentless fight against abortion and the historic forced sterilization of women of color, was an attempt to destroy a woman’s autonomy by determining what she can do with her body.

Federline couldn’t have picked a better time to publicly humiliate Spears again. Even after the gruesome unsealed documents of the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp lawsuit, Dior has signed a seven-figure deal with Depp to front his cologne, Sauvage. And Brian Warner, aka Marilyn Manson, has sued Evan Rachel Wood for defamation in the wake of her forceful testimony about his alleged abuse..

These situations are not identical, but they do share one underlying dynamic: women who speak out about their alleged abuse still reliably face retaliation. In Spears’ case, the pain is compounded by history: This behavior from Federline and online critics is pretty much an exact reinterpretation of the bullying the singer faced as a young mother under a blazing spotlight.

The endless chatter and armchair psychoanalysis surrounding Spears, of course, isn’t meant to help the recovering pop idol become a “better” parent, but to entertain a callous audience and enrich everyone around her — anyone who’s still a little gossip has to trade another 15 minutes television. Just as Spears fans suggested a few years ago when Federline tried to kick Spears’ child support payments to a whopping $60,000 a month (from the $20,000 he was already cashing in), now might seem like a good time for K- Fed to “seek a real job.”