Britney Spears Has Blasted Diane Sawyer For That Infamous 2003 Interview
After months of campaigning by her most committed and unwavering fans, Britney Spears is finally free.
Earlier this year, the conservatorship that controlled an agonising amount of her daily life was overturned. Her voice is now her own: she is free to speak her mind, and to express her own distaste for the ways that the mainstream media belittled and traumatised her over these years.
Now, Spears is exercising that right to free speech by slamming an infamous interview with Diane Sawyer, the American journalist who brought the pop star to tears.
The interview, which aired in 2003, focused on Spears’ break-up with Justin Timberlake. Sawyer put all of the blame on Spears for the dissolution of the relationship, asking frankly inappropriate personal questions about what conspired between the two of them.
“You did something that caused him so much pain, so much suffering,” Sawyer said to Spears. “What did you do?”
Later in the same chat, Sawyer read Spears back a quote in which she claimed that she had only had one sexual partner, before insinuating that Spears cheated on Timberlake. “You said, ‘I’ve only slept with one person in my whole life, two years into my relationship with Justin.’ And yet he’s left the impression that you weren’t faithful, that you betrayed the relationship.”
The footage of that chat was included in the documentary Framing Britney Spears, and prompted an outcry from her fans.
Now, years after the fact, Spears is calling for an apology via her Instagram, in a now-deleted post. More specifically, Spears has said that Sawyer can “kiss [her] white ass.”
“Do we dare forget the Diane Sawyer interview in my apartment almost 20 years ago?” Spears wrote, as reported by Page Six. “What was with the ‘You’re in the wrong’ approach?? Geeze… and making me cry??? My manager put that woman in my home and made me talk to her on national television. She asked if I had a shopping problem!!! When did I have a shopping problem?
“Something I never shared when I had that breakup years ago was that I couldn’t talk afterwards,” Spears went on to admit. “I was in shock… pretty lame of my dad [Jamie] and three men to show up at my door when I could hardly speak… two days later, they put Diane Sawyer in my living room…they forced me to talk!
“I was a baby…I was almost 22 and didn’t understand, but I fucking do now…I would like to say now, ‘Ma’am I’m a catholic slut!!!’”
Sawyer has yet to respond to Spears.