Justin Timberlake allegedly ended his three-year relationship with Britney Spears by sending her a brief text message, it has been claimed.
Timberlake, 42, and Spears, 41, dated each other for three years before they broke up in 2002 amid speculation the “Baby One More Time” hitmaker cheated on him.
To the outside world, Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake’s early aughts love story was picture-perfect.
But new revelations about the couple’s relationship show the *NSYNC star was not that innocent behind closed doors.
In her upcoming bombshell memoir, “The Woman in Me,” Spears revealed how she had an abortion after becoming pregnant by Timberlake.
Now Page Six (US Based entertainment website) can reveal exactly how he dumped her with a two-word text — prompting her to say: “He blew the best thing he ever had.”
It was February 2002, and Spears was just 20 when she happily stepped on the set of the “Overprotected: The Darkchild Remix” music video in downtown Los Angeles ready to “power through” rigorous dance scenes during a two-day shoot.
“There are those people where there is something inside of them and you don’t know where it comes from — it’s like an ‘X’ factor. That’s what we saw with her,” director Chris Applebaum tells Page Six.
“I was so happy that this person who was the biggest star in the world was everything I wanted her to be and then more.
But toward the end of a strenuous second day of filming, Applebaum recalls that Spears suddenly went missing for about 20 to 40 minutes — which is a “long time” because it costs “20 grand to sit around.”
When he arrived at her trailer, he saw the singer sitting on the floor with her legs crossed, her makeup smudged, and in tears.
Spears, who was dressed in a Juicy Couture sweatsuit, held up her Motorola flip phone to Applebaum and said, “I can’t believe it. Look it. This happened.”
Then she showed a text from Timberlake that read, “It’s over!!!”
Timberlake, then 21, had been trying to reach Spears all day while at her shoot, per Applebaum, in big part because he was “pissed” about her cheating with choreographer Wade Robson.
Spears admitted the indiscretion in the new memoir.
Applebaum recalls Spears’ longtime assistant and friend, Felicia Culotta, putting her arm around the singer’s shoulder and comforting her.
Spears was hesitant to finish the shoot, but Applebaum says he encouraged her by saying, “If you don’t have it in you, I totally understand … but if you want to go out there and finish this last set-up in the rain, you can show him that he just made the biggest f—ing mistake of his life.”
Spears looked at Applebaum at that moment and said, “You know that? That’s a good idea.
“I’m going to show him that he blew the best thing he ever had.”
Applebaum, who has since worked with the likes of Rihanna and Usher, recalls Spears shooting the rain sequence with even more “conviction,” as if she were “on a mission.”
In her memoir, Spears writes that after the split, she fled home to Louisiana, where she felt “comatose”while Timberlake was “happily running around Hollywood.”
A few months later, the former boy bander released a solo record titled “Cry Me a River” that seemingly confirmed Spears was unfaithful, vilifying his ex.
He sings in the track, “You don’t have to say, what you did / I already know, I found out from him,” referencing the affair with Robson.
Spears writes in her memoir that the chart-topping song and its music video — which featured her lookalike — painted her as a “harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy.”
