Twenty years after Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears broke up, Jamie Lynn Spears reflected on how 'heartbreaking' the experience must have been for her sister.
“I think everyone thought it was forever,” Jamie Lynn Spears said while discussing Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake’s relationship on the Call Her Daddy podcast, according to People’s preview of the Jan. 17 episode. Jamie Lynn, 30, said that she was “so sad,” after Britney and Justin, both 40, called it off. “because my sister was so sad, but that, too, was the first time I saw [that] maybe I didn’t know everything about the relationship. Perhaps they were protecting me, and obviously, why would they talk to me about anything.”
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— Call Her Daddy (@callherdaddy) January 17, 2022
Britney and Justin dated from 1998 to 2002, and while Jamie Lynn doesn’t know the exact reason why the couple called it quits, she told Call Her Daddy that she sympathized with Britney – especially after Timberlake dropped his breakup diss track, “Cry Me A River,” in 2002. I thought how heartbreaking it must have been for my sister when ‘Cry Me a River’ came out. Don’t get me wrong, like, that’s a way to launch your solo career, right? That’s a way to do it, but I felt really sad,” said Spears, per PEOPLE.
“And my sister, she wrote that song ‘Everytime,'” said Jamie Lynn, “and she’s beyond brilliant with anything creative, and she picked that song out on the piano, and she wrote it, and it still makes me cry because I think about how heartbroken she was, because that was her song and that was his song.”
Justin Timberlake issued an apology to Britney Spears following the airing of FX’s Framing Britney Spears documentary, which put the spotlight on his “Cry Me River Song.” “I am deeply sorry for the times in my life where my actions contributed to the problem, where I spoke out of turn, or did not speak up for what I was right,” he wrote in February 2021. “I specifically want to apologize to Britney Spears and Janet Jackson both individually, because I care for and respect these women and I know I failed.”
Jamie Lynn Spears has been in the spotlight recently due to her ongoing feud with her sister and her upcoming memoir, Things I Should Have Said. Britney accused her sister of selling “a book at my expense,” which prompted Jamie Lynn to issue a statement. “I hate to burst by sister’s bubble, but my book is not about her,” she wrote, adding that she doesn’t want any drama and that her book is Jamie Lynn’s way of “speaking my truth to heal my traumas, so I can close this chapter and move forward, and I wish my sister could do the same.” Britney responded to that with a note where she accused Jamie of siding “with the people that hurt me most.”
