Britney Spears has claimed that her estranged father, Jamie Spears, forced her to check into rehab during her “Piece of Me” Las Vegas residency in 2014.
via: Page Six
The pop star writes in “The Woman in Me” that her then-boyfriend, Charlie Ebersol, introduced her to energy-boosting products without seeking approval from Jamie, who oversaw her medical care at the time as her conservator.
“Charlie worked out every day, taking pre-workout supplements and a whole bunch of vitamins. He shared his nutrition research with me and started giving me energy supplements,” she recalls.
“My father didn’t like that. He knew what I ate; he even knew when I would go to the bathroom. So when I started taking energy supplements, he saw that I had more energy onstage and that I was in better shape than I had been.”
While Britney believed Ebersol’s regimen was “a good thing” for her health, she claims Jamie “started to think that [she] had a problem with those energy supplements, even though they were over-the-counter, not prescription.”
“So he told me I had to get off them, and he sent me to rehab,” she writes in the book, which hit stores Tuesday.
The “Overprotected” singer says she spent a month at a facility in Malibu, Calif., where she was surrounded by “a lot” of “serious” drug abusers.
“I was scared to be there by myself,” she remembers, calling her father “horrible” for “throwing [her] away” in a “place with crack and heroin addicts.”
This is the first time Britney has revealed the rehab stint, though Star magazine reported at the time that she had gone to Summit Malibu “between Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
Her “Piece of Me” residency — which ran from 2013 to 2017 — notably had a break from Nov. 9 to Dec. 26, 2014.
“When I got out, I started doing shows again in Vegas like nothing had happened,” the “Crossroads” star writes. “Part of that was because my father told me I had to get back out there, and part of it was because I was still so nice, so eager to please, so desperate to do the right thing and be a good girl.”
Jamie’s lawyer did not immediately respond to Page Six’s request for comment.
The Spears family patriarch, 71, had Britney, 41, institutionalized again in 2019 after her doctor found energy supplements in the star’s purse.
“They forced me to go,” she claims in her tell-all, echoing what she said in court in 2021. “They had my back against a wall and I had no choice. … They kept me locked up against my will for months.”
The latter treatment stay was the catalyst for Britney to successfully end her 13-year conservatorship.
“If you stood up for me when I couldn’t stand up for myself,” she tells her readers, “from the bottom of my heart, thank you.”
