Justin Timberlake has denied the long standing rumour that his hit, What Goes Around....Comes Around was written about his ex girlfriend, Britney Spears.
The song was released by Timberlake by 2006, with many speculating that the song was about Spears, whom he had dated from 1999 to 2002. But Timberlake revealed in a recent interview that this is not the case.
Speaking on Complex's Re Rank YouTube series, Timberlake explained that he wrote the song after talking to a friend about the breakdown of their own relationship.
“Maybe I should dispel a rumour at this point, which has gone around forever, which is like, it’s not a personal story from mine", Timberlake said. “It’s actually a personal story from a friend’s that I asked permission [to use]".
He continued: “He was just going through [a break-up] and he was telling me what had happened, and I said, ‘Do you mind if I write about this?’ And I quote, my friend said, ‘Yeah, torch that b****. What goes around comes around.’ And I was like, ‘I have to go. Thank you".
Timberlake went on to say that he wrote the song in "damn near 20 minutes", and it "hit on all cylinders" for him.
Prior to this, Britney Spears had taken aim at Timberlake in her 2023 memoir, The Woman In Me, criticising him over the music video for his single, Cry Me A River, which appeared to show a woman which looked like her, and claimed that it depicted her as a “harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy".
“I was comatose in Louisiana, and he was happily running around Hollywood", Spears wrote.
Spears also alleged that Timberlake had cheated on her several times during their relationship, and that she had an abortion when she was 19, as Justin "wasn't happy" about being a father.
However, a year later, Spears took to Instagram to apologise to Timberlake.
“I wanna apologize for some of the things I wrote about in my book. If I offended any of the people I genuinely care about I am deeply sorry..", she wrote. “I also wanted to say I am in love with Justin Timberlake’s new song ‘Selfish’ [rose emoji] It is soo good and how come every time I see Justin and Jimmy together I laugh so hard ??? Ps ‘Sanctified’ is wow [starry eyed emoji] too.(sic)".
