Megyn Kelly joined the litany of voices Wednesday responding to princess of pop Britney Spears’ new tell-all memoir, “The Woman in Me” — and she blamed the starlet’s home life growing up for her troubled adulthood.
“Is it any wonder she wound up as screwed up as she is?” asked Kelly, joined in conversation on “The Megyn Kelly Show” podcast by The Federalist contributor Evita Duffy-Alfonso and “Do Not Comply” author Will Witt.
“I think there are actually a lot of life lessons in this thing, a lot of life lessons for people thinking about putting their child anywhere near the entertainment industry,” Kelly said. “Frankly, it’s a manual on how not to raise your children.”
Per her account of the Simon & Schuster-published memoir, Kelly was horrified by some of the details Spears reveals of her childhood alongside sister Jamie Lynn.
“She reveals she lost her virginity when she was 14 years old. She was drinking with her mother starting in the eighth grade. She was having daiquiris with her mother. Her little sister was drinking too, apparently even at a younger age, White Russians, which they all thought tasted like ice cream,” Kelly said, shocked. “Is it any wonder she wound up as screwed up as she is? She was taking Adderall like it was candy to get high.”
Kelly then turned her attention to Spears’ infamous conservatorship, from which the singer was freed in November 2021 after 13 years. “Later on, she wound up taking lithium, a very serious drug, thanks to her conservatorship and so on,” Kelly said.
As for then men her life, Kelly didn’t mince words there, either. She laid into Spears’ father Jamie for monitoring her diet and calling her fat at the height of her fame. “The love was not unconditional,” Kelly said.
Then Justin Timberlake, at the time the lead heartthrob of boy band NSYNC, came into Kelly’s crosshairs: “She had an abortion at age 19 when she was dating Justin Timberlake even though she didn’t want to. It’s a horror story. It’s a string of horror stories.
“I look at this and I say I hope young girls read it. And I hope young parents read it and they take away from this: I don’t want anything to do with that industry, I don’t want to be a star, I don’t need millions, I can find my self-worth someplace else,” Kelly said.
“It’s really not that hard to raise good kids,” Kelly added. “It really isn’t. You just have to spend time with them.”
Watch the journalist’s breakdown of Spears’ “The Woman in Me” (now on bookshelves) in the video above.
