Is it too late to apologize?
Timbaland issued an apology to Britney Spears after he said Justin Timberlake should’ve “put a muzzle” on her amid the release of her bombshell memoir.
“I’m sorry to all the Britney fans, even to her,” the music producer said on TikTok Live Tuesday evening.
“You have a voice. You speak what you want to speak. Who am I to tell you what not to speak?”
“I was wrong for saying that,” he added.
Timbaland then emphasized that he respected women, saying, “Hell yeah.”
The “Promiscuous” artist’s video comes after he bashed the “Toxic” hitmaker while speaking on a panel for “Sounds Architects: A Producer Conversation” last week.
Referencing the details Spears shared about her relationship with Timberlake in her memoir, “The Woman in Me,” Timbaland said he was tempted to reach out to the *NSYNC member.
“I wanted to call and say, ‘JT, you gotta put a muzzle on that,’” he said.
Timbaland, 51, further claimed that the “Circus” songstress was trying to “do something to get people’s attention.”
“You know what? We live in the age of social media and … everybody wants to go viral,” he said. “I get it because that’s the way you make money [is to] go viral.”
While the audience laughed at his remarks, others on Twitter were disgusted by the clip.
“In light of her life’s events, this screams misogyny and is so malicious and nasty,” one person wrote.
“I assume the crowd has only straight men,” another chimed in.
In her bestselling book, Spears, 41, detailed her past romance with the “SexyBack” singer, 42 — whom she dated from 1999 to 2002 — and alleged that he cheated on her several times.
The pop star also claimed she had an abortion at age 19 because Timberlake wasn’t ready to have kids.
She wrote that the “Cry Me a River” singer “definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy” and believed they were “too young” to be parents.
“If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it,” she wrote. “And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father.”
Spears also described the “excruciating” pain of getting an abortion at home and “sobbing until it was all over.”
Amid backlash from the memoir, Timberlake has turned off his Instagram comments.
He was recently spotted on a family vacation in Mexico alongside his wife, Jessica Biel, and their two sons.
