Just days after her fan army attempted to block Justin Timberlake‘s new single, “Selfish,” from topping iTunes pop charts around the world by pushing Britney Spears‘ 2011 deep cut of the same name up the tallies, Spears extended an live branch to her long-ago ex.
“I am so in love with Justin Timberlake’s new song ‘Selfish,’” Spears wrote on her Instagram feed — which is now set to private — about the first single from Timberlake’s upcoming sixth album, Everything I Thought It Was. Tacking on a heart emoji, Spears also wrote, “It is soo good and how come every time I see Justin and Jimmy together I laugh so hard ???”
Timberlake appeared on The Tonight Show on Thursday to goof around with longtime friend and comedy foil host Jimmy Fallon, and then the two were reunited again for a run through their famous “Barry Gibb Talk Show” bit on Saturday Night Live this weekend. In addition to playing the mellow “Selfish,” Timberlake debuted the new gospel-tinged burner “Sanctified” alongside Houston rapper Tobe Nwigwe in his first SNL performance of the night.
Spears appeared to love that one as well.
“Ps ‘Sanctified’ is wow [star eyes emoji] too,” Britney added about the second song that’s been revealed so far from the JT album due out on March 15.
The “Selfish” upvote frenzy appeared to come strictly from Spears’ devoted fans and Spears has not publicly weighed in on the effort to resurface the deep cut Femme Fatale bonus track. Thanks to the fan attention, Britney’s “Selfish” hit the top of a number of iTunes pop charts across the world on Friday, either displacing or landing just beneath Timberlake’s single of the same name.
Britney’s Monday (Jan. 29) Instagram post featured another surprise: a blanket mea culpa for anyone whose feelings were hurt by things she revealed in her 2023 tell-all memoir. “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,” Spears wrote without naming names. While Spears did not elaborate on who she was apologizing to about the many headline-grabbing revelations in her best-selling memoir, The Woman In Me, one of the people who came in for particularly harsh criticism after the book’s release last year was Timberlake.
The couple dated from 1999 to 2002, and in the book Spears revealed that she got unexpectedly pregnant during that time and that she had an abortion because Timberlake “definitely wasn’t happy about pregnancy“; she also wrote that though she could never have imagined choosing an abortion, she agreed to not have the child. “Given the circumstances, that is what we did,” she said about the procedure they kept secret.
Timberlake didn’t respond to the allegations in the book about his alleged behavior during their relationship, but he did turn off comments on his Instagram after it was flooded with angry comments from Britney’s supporters at the time.
He did, however, appear to allude to the firestorm during a Las Vegas show in December, where he told a crowd he meant “no disrespect” before playing his 2002 solo hit “Cry Me a River,” widely seen as a commentary on the couple’s March 2002 split after three years together.
The couple’s brief teenage romance has spurred years of headlines, repeatedly stoking the fires of anger against JT from the Britney Army. In the book, however, Spears wrote that her love for her former boy band flame was eternal. “After that, I was messed up for a while, especially because I still love Justin so much,” she wrote. “It was insane how much I loved him, and for me, it was unfortunate.”
