Britney Spears says her Father belittled and degraded her while in her 13-year conservatorship, which ended in 2021 but had left her feeling “robot-like.”

In a new cover story for People, Britney Spears briefly speaks to the magazine about her reason for doing her memoir The Woman in Me, which arrives Oct. 24. The rare interview runs alongside an extensive excerpt that traces her childhood days in The Mickey Mouse Club to making her first album to her infamous head shaving incident and eventual 13-year conservatorship. Much of the excerpts focus on control — how much she once had over herself and the result of having that taken away — and the way she was objectified by the industry and her father.

“I’d been eyeballed so much growing up. I’d been looked up and down, 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,” she said. “But under the conservatorship, I was made to understand that those days were now over. 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.”

Spears details how her father and the former conservator of her estate and person, Jamie, belittled and controlled her for more than a decade, repeatedly telling her she “looked fat and that I was going to have to do something about it.” It was an experience she says took her passion for singing and dancing.

“Feeling like you’re never good enough is a soul-crushing state of being for a child. He’d drummed that message into me as a girl, and even after I’d accomplished so much, he was continuing to do that to me,” she recalled. “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.”

Spears goes on to say that the 13-year conservatorship, which officially ended in November 2021, “stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child” and ultimately saw her become more of an entity than a person while performing. According to the singer, if her father and the world had let her work out navigating celebrity, she would have “come out of this the right way and worked it out.”

“Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself. I think back now on my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for that long and it makes me feel sick,” she said. “Think of how many male artists gambled all their money away; how many had substance abuse or mental health issues. No one tried to take away their control over their bodies and money. I didn’t deserve what my family did to me.”

She says that the conservatorship had robbed her of her freedom so much, she would fall into teen and child-like behavior. “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.”

The experience — which she says she found laughable in the context of winning awards while “supposedly so incapacitated that I had to be controlled” — ultimately deprived her of a full life, including those “sins of indulgence and adventure that make us human,” resulting in the death to her creativity.

Speaking to her earlier childhood before she attained massive global fame, Spears describes a childhood where, as a member of the Mickey Mouse Club, she kissed Justin Timberlake as a Janet Jackson song played in the background, and drank daiquiris in Biloxi, Mississippi with her mother. “I loved that I was able to drink with my mom every now and then. The way we drank was nothing like how my father did it,” she recalled. “When he drank, he grew more depressed and shut down. We became happier, more alive and adventurous.”

She also details her fear as she slid around the MTV Music Awards stage with a giant snake draped around her neck as she sang “I’m a Slave 4 U,” unassumingly falling into method acting while filming Crossroads — “pretty much the beginning and end of my acting career,” and a relief to the singer, who says she was happy she lost out on The Notebook lead to Rachel McAdams.

“Even though it would have been fun to reconnect with Ryan Gosling after our time on the Mickey Mouse Club, I’m glad I didn’t do it,” she said. “I imagine there are people in the acting field who have dealt with something like that, where they had trouble separating themselves from a character. I hope I never get close to that occupational hazard again. Living that way, being half yourself and half a fictional character, is messed up. After a while you don’t know what’s real anymore.”

While discussing her post-conservatorship memoir, The Woman in Me, Spears said, it is a way to tell her story without consequence, but it’s still “hard to speak about” things like “not getting a moment of peace, the judgments from strangers who don’t even know me, having my freedom stripped away from me by my family and the government [and] losing my passion for the things I love.” 

“It is finally time for me to raise my voice and speak out, and my fans deserve to hear it directly from me,” she told People. “No more conspiracy, no more lies — just me owning my past, present and future.”