Framing Britney Spears Has Fans Up in Arms For Another Pop Star Wronged by Justin Timberlake

Louisa Ballhaus

February 9, 2021 at 8:25 AM·4 min read

Justin Timberlake, the internet is coming for you. FX’s The New York Times Presents: Framing Britney, a new documentary about the inimitable Britney Spears’ rise and fall as a pop star, up through her currently contested conversatorship case, came out this weekend, and while it certainly meant to re-stoke the flames of ire toward Britney fans inclined to hold ex Justin Timberlake responsible for negative media attention she’s fielded over the years, it also lit another fire they may not have been expecting. This Sunday was Super Bowl Sunday — but if you ask some on Twitter, they’ll tell you it’s Colin Kaepernick and Janet Jackson appreciation day, who both saw their careers cut short on the NFL field. When Timberlake ripped that fateful piece of fabric off Jackson’s costume at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, he left her to collect the shame and scoldings while sliding by unscathed — much as he did after his fateful breakup with Spears, while she was harassed on national TV.

In one distressing clip revisited by Framing Britney, Diane Sawyer questions Spears repeatedly about her breakup with Timberlake, framing him as the broken-hearted victim of her feminine wiles.

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“You broke his heart, you did something that caused him so much pain, so much suffering. What did you do?” Sawyer asked Spears, who eventually burst into tears.

Can’t stop thinking about how Justin Timberlake got to skate by without injuring his reputation while Janet Jackson and Britney Spears got publicly destroyed after professional (Janet) and romantic (Britney) entanglements with him.
Misogyny, man.
— Emma Gray (@emmaladyrose) February 7, 2021

Happy Janet Jackson Appreciation Day, may Justin Timberlake get what's coming to him
— Kristin Chirico (@lolacoaster) February 7, 2021

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Spears was publicly implied to have cheated on Timberlake, who went on to make what was basically a revenge track, “Cry Me a River.” His trajectory after the 2004 Super Bowl was similar: while he joked about it on live TV and won a Grammy later that year, Jackson was forced to issue a public apology, had her music blacklisted by Viacom, was banned from the Grammys, and never fully professionally recovered. In a moment that was, arguably, far more Timberlake’s fault than Jackson’s as the one to rip the fabric, it was still Jackson who was lambasted for having shown lewd imagery onscreen.

One day, the scope and magnitude of what Justin Timberlake did to Janet Jackson is going to be fully examined in the context of how much we now know collectively as a culture, and it's going to be deeelicious.
Oh whoops. Happy Superbowl Sunday, y'all.
— Morgan Jerkins (@MorganJerkins) February 7, 2021

I wonder if we will ever get a Free Britney-esque look at the amount of media fuckery Janet Jackson had to deal with
— alex (@alex_abads) February 7, 2021

Timberlake has acknowledged in the years since that he could have handled the fallout from the Jackson halftime show better, offering this weakly-worded update in 2007 to MTV: “In my honest opinion now … I could’ve handled it better. I probably got 10 percent of the blame, and that says something about society. I think that America’s harsher on women … And I think that America is, you know, unfairly harsh on ethnic people.”

America was indeed harsher on resident woman and ethnic person Janet Jackson, who became an easy scapegoat for all involved furiously looking for someone to blame in wake of a fat FCC fine for having violated regulations and a black mark on their reputation as family-friendly performers. Timberlake took the bait in placing the blame on Jackson while skating away, and nearly 20 years after the initial incident, we’re ready to hear a second draft of his apology.

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