Britney Spears wasted absolutely no time getting back on the horse after Justin Timberlake broke up with her via text message in 2002.
The Princess of Pop went back to work to film the fierce music video for “Overprotected (The Darkchild Remix)” just moments after the split that she says left her “comatose.”
“At some point during the 2nd [half of the video shoot] Brit disappeared and I went to her trailer to fetch her…only to discover her BF Justin had just broken up with her via text message. (Let me recommend to any who reads this: don’t break up via text!),” the video’s director, Chris Applebaum, recalled on Instagram in April 2022.
“We sat on the floor of her trailer for a minute, talked it out, and then rallied. I told her she should get out there & show Justin he made the biggest mistake of his life.”
The sexy video, which was filmed in March 2002 when Spears was 20 years old, features the “Toxic” singer dancing her heart out in a sheer, turtleneck-style crop top and low-rise, distressed denim short-shorts.
Filmed in Los Angeles’ Millennium Biltmore Hotel, the song and video reflect Spears’ crusade to shred her adolescent image and be treated as an adult.
Unfortunately, she went on to lose any agency when she was placed under a conservatorship controlled by her father, Jamie Spears, in February 2008 following a series of public breakdowns.
In her new memoir, “The Woman in Me,” the “Crossroads” star reveals she infamously shaved her head in February 2007 as a means to hit back at the constant scrutiny she was facing at the time.
“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 tome, which hits stores on Oct. 24.
once her dad assumed control of her life and finances, Britney lost all say in her everyday 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.”
The “(You Drive Me) Crazy” songstress admits that the 13 years she spent under the conservatorship caused her to become a “robot.”
“The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage,” she writes. “I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
Britney and Timberlake, 42, dated for three years but split after allegedly cheating on each other.
