Britney Spears Recalls Why She Was ‘Grounded For Weeks’ During COVID-19 Pandemic

Pop star Britney Spears is opening up about the time that she got grounded during the COVID-19 pandemic in her memoir "The Woman In Me."

While it's not the most sensational bit of news to come out of her tell-all memoir, it does give a look at the pop star's life and makes her feel just a little bit more relatable.

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in 2020, Britney wrote that she became “more of a homebody,” as per Us Weekly. She recalled how she spent most of her time listening to audiobooks or crafting jewelry, but she also confessed that there were times when she just stared at the wall because she was just so bored.

Although she could venture outside her property, Britney recalled how the security team hired by her father, Jamie Spears “kept enforcing rules” whenever she stepped foot out her door. At one point, Britney removed her mask on a trip to the beach. Even though she was outdoors, Britney claims that she was “reprimanded and grounded for weeks.”

Although she had been in a relationship with actor Sam Asghari since 2016 after meeting on the set of her “Slumber Party” music video, he was not isolating with her due to his work schedule and strict quarantine rules. Britney wrote about how she got so “lonely” during the pandemic that she planned a trip to see her family in Louisiana; however, that trip went worse than expected.

On Friday, a source told Us Weekly that Britney, 41, explained why she didn’t want to see her family ever again, which consists of Jamie Spears, 71, her mother Lynne Spears, 68, her brother Bryan Spears, 46, or her sister, Jamie Lynn Spears, 32. Britney explained that she found “peace” when she decided that she “never wanted to see” any of them ever again.

In part of the memoir, she says that she decided to visit her family in Louisiana because they had allegedly stopped answering her calls. During the visit, she realized that her family had thrown away her priceless Madame Alexander doll collection, which had been given to her as a child.

Britney had stored many different items at Lynne’s house when she was in a mental health treatment facility in 2019. Unfortunately, Lynne threw many of her items out, including several year’s “worth of my writing’ and “binders” of poetry that she had written. She realized that her family had “thrown me away” by throwing away her items and decided it was “time to find God” and remove her family from her life once and for all.

On Tuesday, People magazine published an excerpt from the memoir where Britney explained how she felt like a “child-robot” while under the strict rules of her conservatorship. “I became a robot. But not just a robot — a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself,” Britney wrote.

“The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage,” she continued. “I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”

“This is what’s hard to explain, how quickly I could vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom. There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl; but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult,” she continued.

In the book, she adds: “The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time," she added. "I felt like I was being deprived of those good secrets of life — those fundamental supposed sins of indulgence and adventure that make us human. They wanted to take away that specialness and keep everything as rote as possible. It was death to my creativity as an artist.”

Britney Spears' memoir "The Woman In Me" is scheduled for release on Tuesday, October 24, 2023.