Copyright Vulture
Kevin Federline has emerged from the shadows of his self-imposed exile to release You Thought You Knew, his arguably overdue response to the past several years of Britney Spears–related media and speculation. Though Federline and Spears were married for only a little more than two years, the two share sons together, and he remains her most notorious ex, best known as a tabloid fixture alongside her. With his children (not only the ones with Spears) now older and more time on his plate, Federline wants to clear his name no matter what. In You Thought You Knew, he finally gives us his side of the story, reigniting a number of conflicts between him and Spears in the process. He wrote this memoir to clear his name for his kids Federline asserts over and over again that everything he’s done in his life is for the benefit of his family. Yes, he’s been led astray by fame, and yes, he’s played the villain. But as he says in the introduction, he wanted to hold off until his kids could handle it all. “My kids were still young, still finding their way through a world that was already heavy on their shoulders. I didn’t want to make it heavier. I didn’t want to stir shit up when they were the ones who’d feel it most. So I waited,” he writes. Federline admits he sat in silence while “everyone else” — the media, blogs, strangers, exes — told his story on his behalf. “I don’t want them growing up feeling like they have to explain who their father is,” he says of his kids. “I don’t want them defending shit they never lived.” Though Federline has six children across three relationships, he seems to mostly be speaking to and about his sons Preston and Jayden, whom he shares with ex-wife Britney Spears. What Federline’s “deal” is remains, um, kind of a mystery Cast your mind back, if you can, to 2005: What is Kevin Federline’s “job”? What does he do? Federline got his start in the entertainment industry as a backup dancer, a career he describes as “not just a passion, but a way out.” In fact, the way Federline describes dance, the art form never seemed like a passion at all but a vehicle through which he could achieve fame. All of his memories of his greatest times dancing focus on crossing paths with celebrities — Michael Jackson, for instance — or being onstage under the lights. In the aftermath of his relationship with Spears, Federline turned to rap. “Meanwhile, I was pouring myself into my music — into that album,” he says of his universally panned 2006 album, Playing with Fire. “That was something just for me. A piece of me I could finally claim. I believed in it. I needed it.” Federline never really makes it seem like he does need it so much as the album is something to do. Same with his stints on reality TV and wrestling. He writes at one point in the book that focusing on his family got in the way of building his brand, but as his kids grow, it becomes increasingly clear that Federline’s brand may be in crisis no matter what. He’s always had to work to make his money even with child support from Spears Some of the more compelling details of You Thought You Knew pertain to Federline’s separation agreement with Spears. As he describes it, “When Britney and I divorced, the court awarded me $20,000 a month in child support. At the same time, I was receiving alimony, another $20,000 a month, for half the duration of our marriage. People hear figures like that and think you’re financially set.” He notes that “just maintaining a home and a lifestyle that matched what the boys were used to with their mother easily ran well over $40,000 a month. Rent, security, a full-time nanny, transportation, and all the other day-to-day needs of raising two kids in L.A., as well as my two children — it added up fast. That money was gone almost as soon as it came in.” Part of why Federline became such a staple doing club appearances and his 2007 Super Bowl commercial was to pay for a lifestyle he was only ever briefly acquainted with. He might be coasting on Spears’s name, but he’s definitely not coasting on her money. He loves name-dropping celebs Any time Federline gets remotely close to a famous person, he makes sure you know about it. He had a fated run-in with Snoop Dogg not long after his album came out that reads like a middle-school fantasy of hanging out with a rapper. “Not long after Snoop started his set, he spotted me, cut the music, and said, ‘Fatherhood! My man K-Fizzle gotta be one of the biggest pimps in the world.’ I walked over to Snoop, pulled a fat blunt out of my pocket, and handed it to him. He lit it right there and got back on the mic: ‘Ooooweee! Fatherhood brought the fire! This that real Cali OG shit!’” Federline says. Once he and Spears separated, he made most of his money from his short-term reality stints and his small arcs in the WWE back in 2007. “The plan was simple: I’d come out, play the villain, talk some trash, and Cena would take me down. They told me they’d use my single, ‘America’s Most Hated,’ as my theme song. I’d come out to the music, rile up the crowd, and Cena would interrupt and set me straight,” he explains. Everyone loved this, so Federline claims — even Shaquille O’Neal and his family. “Shaq said, ‘We’re here to watch Cena kick your ass.’ We both laughed, all in good fun.” There’s one celebrity, however, Federline noticeably doesn’t name. One time, he catches Spears doing “a fat line of coke” off a table with “an actress who was about to blow up from a role that would transform her life.” Any guesses? Given this is in 2004, we’re thinking Cady Heron. He also loves partying Federline insists that any and all partying he did was mostly a result of needing to let off steam from the stresses of being a parent and at one point in time married to a pop star. Right — that’s also why most people party. Still, does this sound like a kind of person who is partying just to relieve stress? “When I didn’t have the kids, I was out. Not ‘a few drinks with the boys’ kind of out. This was a full-blown bacchanal bender of a first-rate Hollywood order, a journey through the underbelly of L.A.: strippers blowing cocaine in each other’s asses, guys tag-teaming chicks in my hot tub, a bordello masquerading as a porn studio masquerading as a dental office …don’t even get me started,” he writes. Don’t worry, bud, that’s plenty enough as is. Yes, there are a lot of allegations about Britney Spears’s parenting and drug use In order to make his case for father of the year, Federline takes any and all opportunities to prove that Spears was a bad partner and a bad parent. This starts early in the book, when he details a night early on in his relationship with Spears when she allegedly snuck out their hotel room while on tour to hook up with one of her female dancers. All considered, that’s a lurid but harmless allegation. Later in the memoir, however, Federline makes some pretty serious claims about Spears drinking while pregnant and breastfeeding her kids while drinking and doing drugs. (He alleges there to have been a certain hypocrisy in this, given that one of Spears’s big blow-ups at him came when she caught him smoking weed in the studio.) “What shook me the most was realizing how fragile everything was. If she could make a choice like that, breastfeeding our boys while high, what else was she capable of? And how many times had it happened before without me knowing?” Federline speculates. Though it was Spears who filed for divorce against him, Federline writes that he had been considering it himself as his ex-wife spiraled out of control. Including the one about Britney and the knife
