Britney Spears SLAMS Ryan Seacrest For 2007 ‘Fit Mother’ Interview

Host Ryan Seacrest may have gotten a shout-out from pop star Britney Spears in her memoir "The Woman In Me" but it wasn't for a good reason.

Instead, the Princess of Pop recalled how the former "American Idol" host questioned her parenting skills during a 2007 interview which took place only months before her controversial 13-year conservatorship started in February 2008. The conservatorship would last until November 2021, when it was finally struck down by a judge.

Britney Spears was married to Kevin Federline from 2004 to 2007. The two shared two children together – Sean Preston, 18, and Jayden James, 17. However, in 2007, her two children were still very young when Ryan Seacrest decided to grill her on her parenting skills while the pop star was trying to promote her new album Blackout.

“The only press I did for Blackout was a live radio interview with Ryan Seacrest when it came out in October 2007,” Britney wrote in her memoir, as per the Daily Mail. “In the interview which was supposed to be about the record, Ryan Seacrest asked me questions like ‘How do you respond to those who criticize you as a mom?’ and ‘Do you feel like you're doing everything you can for your kids?’ and ‘How often will you see them?’”

“It felt like that was the only thing people wanted to talk about: whether or not I was a fit mother. Not about how I’d made such a strong album while holding two babies on my hips and being pursued by dozens of dangerous men all day every day,” she recalled, which then prompted her to think more deeply about the vicious custody battle she was going through at the time.

“My management team quit. A bodyguard went to court with Gloria Allred by his side as a witness in the custody case. He said I was doing drugs; he wasn't cross-examined. A court-appointed parenting coach said that I loved my children and that we were clearly bonded. She also said that there was nothing at all in my home that could be called abuse,” Britney wrote, adding, “But that part didn't make headlines.”

Britney has taken part in several interviews with the upcoming “Wheel of Fortune” host in the following years, so it doesn’t seem like she holds any ill will towards him for the 2007 interview, which took place in the same year that she publicly shaved her head. That same week, she was also seen attacking a photographer’s car with an umbrella.

Last  Tuesday, exactly one week before her tell-all book “The Woman In Me” was scheduled for release, People magazine released a few excerpts from the memoir, including the passage where the "Toxic" singer explains why she shaved off her hair. Britney wrote, “I’d been eyeballed so much growing up. I’d been looked up and down and had people telling me what they thought of my body since I was a teenager. Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back.”

Unfortunately, after her conservatorship started, she lost control over how she wanted to look. “I was made to understand that those days were now over,” she wrote. “I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take.”

During the conservatorship, which Britney said contributed to the "death of [her] creativity as an artist," she also described feeling like a "shadow" of herself. “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,” she wrote in her memoir. “The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”

Britney Spears' memoir "The Woman In Me" was officially released on Tuesday, October 24, 2023.