Britney Spears hits out at “incredibly cruel” paparazzi in birthday message

Britney Spears

Britney Spears has hit out at “incredibly cruel” paparazzi in a video clip shared on her 43rd birthday.

Rolling Stone reported that yesterday (December 2) marked both the end of the six-month waiting period that followed her divorce from Sam Asghari, and her 43rd birthday. PEOPLE Magazine then reported that Spears has been vacationing in Mexico to celebrate the latter occasion, as the pop star has not publicly addressed the divorce waiting period.

Now, in a clip shared on Instagram, Spears has taken issue with photos that paparazzi photographers have taken of her while in Mexico.

“It really hurts my feelings that the paparazzi make my face look like I’m wearing a white Jason mask,” Spears said, referring to the Friday The 13th character.

“It doesn’t even look like me. They’ve always been incredibly cruel to me… the way they’ve illustrated me to be. I know I’m not perfect at all by any means, but some of it is extremely mean and that’s why I’ve moved to Mexico.”

Spears, who has said that she’ll “never return to the music industry”, has been enjoying her freedom after settling her highly-publicised conservatorship battle with father Jamie – however, this has also allegedly left her with his $2million legal bill.

The ‘Toxic’ singer has repeatedly accused her family members of wrongdoing during her conservatorship, which ran for 13 years and was ultimately terminated in November 2021, following the widespread #FreeBritney movement.

She also wrote about the circumstances in her memoir The Woman In Me. “I became a robot. But not just a robot – a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilised that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself,” she wrote in one passage (via LBC).

Britney Spears at the ‘Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood’ premiere on July 22, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Steve Granitz/WireImage)

“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… 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.”

In recent news, a biopic on Spears based on The Woman In Me has been in development under Wicked director Jon M Chu.

“In this initial conception, I think it’s a lot about how we treat people, young people, stars that we think we own, women, mothers,” he said.

Despite the project having already been announced, Spears herself caused confusion in September when she seemed to imply that the “secret project” she was working on with Chu was in fact not a biopic of her life, but a “fictional musical”.

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