Britney Spears Says 2003 Diane Sawyer Interview ‘Was a Breaking Point’: ‘I Had Been Exploited’

Britney Spears was just 21 years old when her team invited Diane Sawyer into her home for an interview — and the ways in which the journalist grilled the pop star on various aspects of her personal life and career still haunt her.

In her new memoir The Woman in Me, Spears, now 41, writes that the controversial sit-down was a “breaking point” for her.

“I felt like I had been exploited, set up in front of the whole world,” writes Spears. “That interview was a breaking point for me internally — a switch had been flipped. I felt something dark come over my body. I felt myself turning, almost like a werewolf, into a Bad Person.”

A rep for Sawyer did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.

In the Primetime interview, which aired in November 2003, Sawyer, now 77, grilled Spears on her high-profile split from Justin Timberlake, with a line of questioning inspired by rumors sparked by Timberlake himself that the pop star had cheated on him.

‘He’s going on television and saying you broke his heart,” Sawyer said. “You did something that caused him so much pain. So much suffering. What did you do?’”

At one point during the interview, Sawyer asked Spears about the “spasm of publicity” surrounding her personal life, prompting the pop star to break down in tears and ask the crew to put an end to the chat.

Spears repeatedly declared herself “embarrassed” during the sit-down and was criticized by Sawyer for having “upset a lot of mothers in this country” by shedding her good-girl image via scantily clad magazine covers. (Sawyer began the special by declaring Spears’ abs the “most valuable square inch of real estate in the entertainment universe.”)

Though the interview with Sawyer aired decades ago, the journalist has come under fire for her line of questioning in recent years, especially after the release of The New York Times’ Framing Britney Spears documentary in 2021.

That same year, Spears spoke out against Sawyer in a lengthy message on Instagram that asked, “What was with the ‘You’re in the wrong’ approach?? Geeze… and making me cry???”

In an interview with PEOPLE done via email, the singer called her new memoir “a labor of love and all the emotions that come with it.”

The memoir will be released through Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, and will “illuminate the enduring power of music and love — and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms,” according to a release.

For an exclusive excerpt and interview with Britney Spears, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere Friday.

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