Kevin Federline and the Spears family: the gaslighting continues
A few days ago, Kevin Federline uploaded three clips from two separate incidents in which his ex-wife, Britney Spears, was unknowingly recorded by their two sons. According to Kevin, the recordings were first made about 4-5 years ago. They show Britney angrily chastising her boys for disrespecting her and/or failing to follow her direction–something K-fed seems to believe is outrageous and unacceptable for a mother to do.
Since there’s minimal context for the videos, I can’t say whether or not the boys earned their lectures. In the first, Britney’s sons appear to be upset that she came into their room while they were getting ready to sleep. She wanted to apply lotion to one of the boys’ cracked skin, which they found unnecessary. The choppy edits then show the argument escalating until Britney demands her children start respecting her and abiding by the rules of her home. In the second video, Britney reprimands one of her sons for walking around bare-foot in Alaskan weather. It’s unclear if he was walking indoors or outdoors; they mention something about a store but also discuss ice-skating, making the exact setting of the inciting incident difficult to establish.
It’s possible that if I’d witnessed both events in full, I would say that Britney was overreacting. That’s also true, however, about literally any other parent in select moments of their life. Parenthood is hard, I’ve been told. If Britney acted regrettably in those videos, she wouldn’t be the first to lose her cool while coping with the stress of raising two teenagers. As Twitter user @britmebaby points out, K-fed’s release of the clips prompted a legion of moms to take to TikTok in solidarity with the popstar:
Especially when we consider her circumstances–trying to speak with authority over her kids while legally having no authority over herself for over 13 years–it’s understandable that Britney would occasionally come across as impatient and combative to the two people she’s tasked with supervising. It’s also understandable that Britney’s sons would find it hard to respect her leadership as a parent.
Britney’s eldest was barely over two years old when his mother lost her right to dictate her own life. The conservatorship Britney unwillingly entered in February of 2008 lasted until November of 2021. In all that time, an unknown number of individuals surrounding the Spears and Federline families were insistent that Britney Spears was an emotionally unstable woman who could not be trusted to make basic decisions about her own life, a notion that was endorsed by the probate court system within the State of California for nearly 14 years. Believing your mom is a bitch and prone to overreaction is already a natural part of adolescence, Put a teen’s mom into a decade-spanning conservatorship and, of course, they’ll be convinced she’s lost her mind whenever they receive any sort of discipline.
I don’t blame Britney’s sons for their uncharitable perspective of her. How could we expect children to rise above the level of contempt that the adults in their family also levy at their mom? Someone I do blame is Kevin Federline, a man who weaponized his offspring’s adolescent rage to get back at his ex-wife for standing up for herself.
A little over a week ago now, clips of K-fed hit the Internet following his interview for a now-cancelled documentary on ITV. Kevin claimed that Britney’s sons haven’t seen her for months, publicizing a private family conflict that no one needed to know about as he discussed his sons’ alleged embarrassment at Britney’s Instagram uploads. Britney and her husband, Sam Asghari, responded on Instagram, with Sam asserting that Britney has the right to express her newfound freedom in any way she chooses before laying into Kevin for being complicit in her abuse and relying on child support payments as his only source of income. Britney’s response was slightly less combative but plenty more resentful as she expressed the pain resulting from her own children’s decision to stop visiting her. She writes,
“I looked forward to seeing my kids every week… they would visit me, walk in the door, go straight to their room and lock the door!!! I always TRIED and TRIED, and maybe that’s why they stopped coming here!!! I wanted them to love me so much that I might have overdone it!!! This summer, they told me, ‘We may come over here less,’ and I was like that’s fine… Well after that, I haven’t seen them since…
In those years of the conservatorship, I had to become a fucking saint with the pain I had to endure by keeping my mouth shut in my stomach as they literally took my womanhood away from me!!! I made up for past mistakes and MORE in that time!!! My sister does it… she speaks up in her household and corrects people!!! But how come whenever I did it, it was considered a threat??? [When my dad got involved,] he would say, ‘SIT DOWN we need to talk’… First thing was ALWAYS ‘nobody likes you’… then the rest of it was I guess due to whatever I said. It was basically, how dare I say something to offend others and make them THINK for a change… But I can’t process how I dedicated 20 years of my life to those kids… everything was about them!!! For them to knock the breath out of me…”
Most damningly, Britney called her children’s treatment of her “hateful” in the now-deleted post. While I, personally, would have warned Brit against using such strong words about her sons on a public platform, it wasn’t her who initially made the friction amongst them public. Even on her wedding day, Kevin’s attorney announced via TMZ, for no discernible purpose other than to embarrass her on her big day, that Britney’s sons wouldn’t be attending. Soon after Elton John officially announced he and Britney had collaborated for an upcoming track, Kevin put Britney’s contentious relationship with her kids into headlines again, most recently escalating the drama by uploading the recordings taken by the boys with the caption, “I can not sit back and let my sons be accused in this way after what they’ve been through. As much as it hurts us, we decided as a family to post these videos. This isn’t even the worst of it. The lies have to stop. I hope our kids grow up to be better than this.”
As Britney’s current, far superior husband pointed out, Kevin Federline does not have a job. Reports have indicated that he not only supported Britney’s conservatorship when it was put into place, he also benefitted from it financially for years after. Following a contentious court battle, Britney agreed in 2018 to pay Kevin somewhere between $20,000-65,000 per month in child support. She was also ordered to fork over $100,000 to pay for K-fed’s legal fees.
Despite being granted a restraining order against Jamie Spears on behalf of his and Britney’s sons after a reported incident in 2019, Kevin is now publicly stating that Jamie “saved” Britney’s life while expressing a desire to welcome Britney’s former conservator back into his kids’ lives. It’s hard to say why exactly K-fed’s perspective on Jamie’s changed so drastically, before the boys’ restraining orders have even expired, but perhaps it has something to do with the fact that in just over two years, Kevin will lose his main source of income when Britney’s sons become legal adults.
He wouldn’t be the first person from Britney’s family to publicly shame her after the termination of her conservatorship threatened their future earnings. A source close to Kevin told Page Six that “posting the videos wasn’t about making [Britney] seem evil or mean, but more about reminding people that she legitimately has a mental illness.” The videos provide as much evidence of Britney’s “mental illness” that Jamie Lynn Spears’ book did, which is to say, not at all.
None of this is to imply that Britney Spears doesn’t have a mental illness. She herself has admitted she’s deeply traumatized and it’s reasonable to assume she’ll likely struggle with her mental health forever for that, even if she didn’t already suffer from other various illnesses and/or disorders, which she might have. Mental illness doesn’t automatically make someone incapable of running their own life or parenting their children, so unless the videos Kevin Federline shared–violating his own kids’ privacy whether they supported the post or not (they’re CHILDREN)–showed Britney being violent or abusive toward her sons, her supposed mental illness is irrelevant and certainly not something she should be shamed for.
Unfortunately for Kevin, the videos don’t even do that. All they show is a woman under stress while trying to parent her children. If this warrants a conservatorship, gather every mother across the United States right now. Perhaps if you find employment in the probate court, Kev, you won’t have to worry about how to fund your known drug habit when the boys turn 18.