Music producer Timbaland has apologised for saying his frequent collaborator Justin Timberlake should “muzzle” his ex-girlfriend Britney Spears after the publication of her memoir The Woman in Me.
Timbaland made the comments on 29 October in conversation with fellow producer 9th Wonder at a talk event at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, with the comments later circulating online. When an audience member mentioned the memoir, Timbaland said: “She’s going crazy, right? I wanted to call and say, ‘JT, man, you gotta put a muzzle on that girl.’” He used a jocular tone, but demeaning language caused outrage among Spears fans.
He also suggested that Spears had written the memoir, which outlines frequently traumatising events including a years-long conservatorship that controlled every aspect of her life, to “go viral”.
“We live in an age of social media and […] everybody wanna go viral,” he said. “I get it ’cause that’s the way you make money, go viral – I gotta do something that gets people’s attention.”
During a live stream on TikTok, Timbaland has since apologised “to the Britney fans, and her. You know about respecting women – hell yeah.”
In The Woman in Me, Spears writes at length about her relationship with Timberlake, whom she dated between 1999 and 2002. She reveals she had an abortion, writing: “If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it. And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father.” She wrote of their eventual breakup: “As much as Justin hurt me, there was a huge foundation of love, and when he left me I was devastated … I could barely speak for months. Whenever anyone asked me about him, all I could do was cry. I don’t know if I was clinically in shock, but it felt that way.”
She also writes about an encounter between the R&B singer Ginuwine and Timberlake when he was in boyband ‘NSync. “‘NSync hung out with Black artists. Sometimes I thought they tried too hard to fit in. One day J and I were in New York, going to parts of town I had never been to before. Walking our way was a guy with a huge, blinged-out medallion. He was flanked by two giant security guards. J got all excited and said so loud, ‘Oh yeah, fo’ shiz fo’ shiz, Ginuwine, what’s up homie?’” Read by Michelle Williams for the audiobook, the segment has been widely shared online.
Timbaland produced four songs on Justin Timberlake’s solo debut Justified, including hit ballad Cry Me a River – whose video underlined the song’s barely veiled references to Spears.
Their collaboration continued, with Timbaland producing the majority of second album FutureSex/LoveSounds and the entirety of third album The 20/20 Experience. Timberlake guested on Timbaland solo tracks such as the hit Give It to Me and the Timbaland-produced Madonna single 4 Minutes; they also worked together on three tracks for Timberlake’s most recent album, 2018’s Man of the Woods.
Elsewhere in the Kennedy Center conversation, 9th Wonder joked: “I don’t think our white brothers and sisters in the audience know that Justin Timberlake belongs to us now,” referring to African Americans. “You know what? That’s true,” Timbaland replied. “He was a Memphis kid who had a lot of soul. His mom raised him around a lot of Motown … he from Memphis, the Stax,” referring to the city’s soul music label.
“Country is country – there’s no difference between white and black, we all do the same things, we all like soul food … his mom and his family, you would have thought they were black, the way they were moving, the music Justin grew up on. And when he went solo he was another one who knew what he wanted and how he wanted to be.”
Speaking about Cry Me a River, Timbaland said: “That was the turning point, like: me and him alike … Sometimes there’s certain people, they give you something that make you say, I always got to go back to this guy.”
The Woman in Me meanwhile sold 1.1m copies in the US in its first week of publication, and topped the UK bestseller chart with 91,000 copies. Spears thanked her fans for the book’s success, saying: “I poured my heart and soul into my memoir, and I am grateful to my fans and readers around the world for their unwavering support.”