Britney Spears Slams Diane Sawyer For “Making Me Cry” During Scathing 2003 Post-Timberlake Breakup Interview

Britney Spears is setting the record straight. In a since-deleted December 13 Instagram post, the pop star opened up about her now-infamous 2003 interview with ABC‘s Diane Sawyer.

As Spears revealed on Instagram, after she and Timberlake broke up in 2002, she barely left her apartment. Therefore, she wasn’t prepared for Sawyers to enter her home and ask such personal questions. During the 45-minute interview, Sawyer made the then 22-year-old Spears cry; Sawyer mercilessly pried about topics ranging from her sex life to her alleged shopping problem, and even asked her to react to the then-first lady of Maryland’s statement that she wanted to shoot her.

“Do we dare forget the Diane Sawyer interview in my apartment almost 20 years ago?” she wrote (per People). “What was with the ‘You’re in the wrong approach?? Geeze… and making me cry???”

Spears added: “Seriously though… I lived in my apartment for a year and never spoke to anyone… my manager put that woman in my home and made me talk to her on national television and she asked if I had a shopping problem!!! when did I have a shopping problem?”

At one point in the primetime special, Sawyer prodded Spears about her 2002 breakup with Justin Timberlake.  While Spears had largely kept to herself after their split, Timberlake spoke openly about their breakup and even implied that she cheated on him in his “Cry Me a River” music video. “You broke his heart,” Sawyers told Spears at the time. “You did something that caused so much pain, so much suffering. What did you do?” (You can watch the complete interview below.)

In her Instagram post, Spears criticized her father, Jamie Spears, for “[forcing] me to talk” to Sawyer, given that she’d hardly been able to speak after her breakup. “I was a baby,” she added.

Over the course of 2021, numerous female stars have opened up about the ways in which they felt unprotected by the press as young women. Last week, Brooke Shields addressed her infamous 1981 interview with Barbara Walters, which occurred shortly after her controversial 1980 Calvin Klein jeans campaign kicked off. Although Shields was only 15, Walters asked her a number of invasive questions about her sexual history.

“It’s practically criminal,” Shields said during an appearance on the December 6 episode of Dax Shepard and Monica Padman’s Armchair Expert podcast. “It’s not journalism.”