Britney Spears Says She Was “Pressured” To Perform At The 2007 VMAs

Britney Spears is reevaluating some of her most controversial moments. In her new memoir, The Woman In Me, Spears revealed that she was pressured by her team into performing at the 2007 Video Music Awards.

The ensuing performance of “Gimme More” garnered major backlash at the time, which she attributes to everything that went wrong in the days leading up to the ceremony.

“I was supposed to perform ‘Gimme More’ at the VMAs to help promote it,” she writes. “I didn’t want to, but my team was pressuring me to get out there and show the world I was fine. The only problem with this plan: I was not fine.”

At the time, Spears was in the middle of her divorce from Kevin Federline and was distraught by not being able to see her two sons, Sean Preston and Jayden James, who were both under two years old at the time.

She decided to persevere, but at the award show, “nothing was going right” backstage — and she had to deal with snarky comments about her body.

Leading Up To The Performance

“There was a problem with my costume and with my hair extensions,” she writes. “I hadn’t slept the night before. I was dizzy. It was less than a year since I’d had my second baby in two years but everyone was acting like my not having six-pack abs was offensive. I couldn’t believe I was going to have to go out onstage feeling the way I felt.”

But it was running into her ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake for the first time since their tumultuous breakup that caused her to panic beforehand.

“Everything was going great in his world,” she recalls. “He was at the top of his game in every way, and he had a lot of swagger. I was having a panic attack. I hadn’t rehearsed enough. I hated the way I looked. I knew it was going to be bad.”

Spears said she “did the best she could in that time” while acknowledging that it was “far from my best” overall. However, what she couldn’t wrap her head around was the enormous criticism that followed.

“I’m not going to defend that performance or say it was good, but I will say that as performers we all have bad nights,” she writes. “They don’t usually have consequences so extreme.”

The “Extreme” VMAs Backlash

Spears recalled experiencing a huge wave of backlash in the weeks after her VMAs performance, ranging from jokes about her body to her mental health. It started the evening of her performance when comedian Sarah Silverman roasted Spears onstage.

“She said that at the age of 25 I’d done everything worthwhile in my life I’d ever do,” she writes. “She called my two babies ‘the most adorable mistakes you’ll ever see.’”

In 2021, Silverman stated that MTV asked her to “mini-roast” Spears after her performance but hadn’t seen it herself beforehand, and expressed regret over her jabs. “I wish I could delete it but I can’t,” she wrote on X.

But it didn’t stop there. Spears recalled magazine headlines making comments about her body, and Dr. Phil calling the performance “a trainwreck.”

Critics used the performance to question her mental health and parenting skills, which affected the one interview she did for her 2007 album, Blackout, in which she said Ryan Seacrest asked her about parenting rather than the album.

“It felt like that was the only thing people wanted to talk about: whether or not I was a fit mother,” she writes. “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.”