Britney Spears celebrates her birthday inside The ScandinavianStyle Mansion December 1, 2007 in Bel Air, California. (Toby Canham/Getty Images)The infamous moment, which took place in 2007, was covered by several media outlets, namely tabloids that created an erroneous narrative that Spears was crazy and mentally unstable. At the time, Spears was navigating her bitter divorce from Kevin Federline and as a result, was targeted by paparazzis and hateful critics.
“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,” Spears wrote.
“Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back,” she added.
In 2008, when Spears was put in a 13-year-long conservatorship under her father, she said she wasn’t allowed to keep her head shaved:
“Under the conservatorship I was made to understand that those days were now over,” Spears 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.”
“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 … 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.”