After 16 years, Britney Spears has finally revealed why she infamously cut off all her hair ahead of her conservatorship.
“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. Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back,” the pop star writes in her forthcoming memoir, “The Woman in Me,” according to an excerpt published by People Tuesday.
However, Britney, 41, notes that once her father, Jamie Spears, took control of her personal, medical and financial affairs in 2008, she no longer had a say in her day-to-day life.
“I was made to understand that those days were now over,” she shares. “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.”
In between a string of stints in rehab, the Grammy winner walked into Esther’s Haircutting Studio in Tarzana, Calif., one night in 2007 and asked for her then-brunette hair to be shaved off.
The salon’s owner, Esther Tognozzi, refused, so Britney took matters into her own hands by grabbing a clipper and giving herself a buzzcut while paparazzi snapped photos through the windows.
Just days later, the “Toxic” singer was photographed attacking a photographer’s car with an umbrella.
The back-to-back incidents, which occurred while she was going through a divorce and custody battle with Kevin Federline, instantly made Britney a tabloid fixture.
But the following year, after she was hospitalized on two involuntary psychiatric holds, Jamie went to court and made himself his daughter’s legal guardian.
“The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child,” Britney writes in her book, which hits stores on Oct. 24. “I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
The “Crossroads” star says she “didn’t deserve” what her family did to her.
“The woman in me was pushed down for a long time,” she writes. “They wanted me to be wild onstage … and to be a robot the rest of the time.”
After Britney testified against her “abusive” conservatorship in open court in 2021, a Los Angeles judge suspended Jamie, now 71, before terminating the arrangement altogether.
