Britney Spears called out her family in a post on Instagram on Wednesday night, saying she is “incredibly lucky to even be alive” after their mistreatment.
“As people, all we really want is to feel connected to each other and never feel alone … for those of you in your family that have said to help you is to isolate you and make you feel unbelievably left out … they were wrong,” she wrote alongside a photograph of a child holding a parent’s hand. “We can forgive as people but u don’t ever forget. Yearning and longing for contact is always crucial !!!”
She added, “I’m incredibly lucky to even be alive with how my family treated me once in my life and now I’m scared of them.”
The singer reflected on how her family hasn’t owned up to their part in her conservatorship. “It’s weird how God works in mysterious ways,” she wrote. “My friends, what do you think he is saying today ??? Because to be totally honest with you, no matter what he says, they will never take responsibility for what they did.”
This isn’t the first time Spears has posted about her family in recent months. In December, she shared an image of a Christmas tree with a sarcastic comment: “Merry late Christmas to my beautiful family who have never disrespected me, harmed me, ever done anything completely unacceptable or caused unbelievable trauma, the kind you can’t fix.”
In November, Spears temporarily deactivated her Instagram account after she posted a series of responses to her ex-husband Kevin Federline‘s recent memoir, You Thought You Knew. The tell-all book, released in October, recounts the couple’s tumultuous relationship, including their marriage in 2004 and their divorce in 2007. Along with an alarming claim that Spears would watch their children sleep with a knife in her hand , Federline wrote: “Something bad is going to happen if things don’t change.” He also claimed she drank while pregnant and did cocaine while breastfeeding.
Spears discussed her family drama in her own memoir, The Woman in Me, which was released in 2024. The best-selling book contained several bombshell revelations, many of which were related to Spears’ controversial conservatorship, which finally ended in 2021. In the book, she said the court-ordered arrangement turned her into “a sort of child-robot,” adding, “I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself.”
The singer also wrote about agreeing to the conservatorship so she’d be able to be with her kids (whom she’d lost custody of after her divorce with Kevin Federline); feeling betrayed by her sister Jamie Lynn, who told Spears to “stop fighting” the conservatorship; and learning about the #FreeBritney movement while she was “locked up against my will” in a rehab facility.
Friends and family members of Tupac Shakur, including his sister Sekyiwa Shakur, hug Chief Deputy District Attorneys Binu Palal after Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis was found guilty in the rapper’s 1996 killing. Bizuayehu Tesfaye/POOL/AFP/Getty Images