Britney Spears explained in her memoir, The Woman in Me, why the message to the public when she first shot to fame was that she was a virgin.
The singer wrote that back when her career started her publicists were keen to market her to the world in a very specific way, which at first she went along with.
She wrote: "The truth was, if you’re young and single in Hollywood, if there’s even a rumor that you’ve had sex, you’re labelled a slut. So my team created this whole narrative around me."
However, Spears pointed out that this was not a narrative that would really hold up in public life considering her relationship with Justin Timberlake.
"Given that I had so many teenage fans, my managers and press people had long tried to portray me as an eternal virgin - never mind that Justin Timberlake and I had been living together, and I'd been having sex since I was fourteen," she wrote in The Woman in Me.
This false narrative hurt her in plenty of ways, as in a particularly harrowing part of her memoir she recounted that during her relationship with Timberlake she had an abortion, but didn't go to hospital in case the news leaked.
Spears described 'sobbing and screaming' on her bathroom floor for hours after the pills she was prescribed left her in agonising pain, saying instead that Timberlake 'thought music would help, so he got his guitar and lay there with me, strumming it.'
Even after they split up in 2002, Spears kept up the lie forced onto her by her team, saying in 2003 that 'two years into my relationship with Justin' was the first time she had sex.
That wasn't the case, as in her memoir Spears explained that she had been having sex since she was 14 and had slept with her brother Bryan Spears' best friend.
"Why did my managers work so hard to claim I was some kind of young-girl virgin even into my twenties? Whose business was it if I'd had sex or not?" she asked in her memoir.
Spears wrote that she was 'marketed as the eternal virgin, but it wasn’t true' and that she 'was being shamed like I hadn’t followed the script', even if the whole thing had been a fabrication invented by her team.
For much of her career, Britney Spears has been controlled in some form and between 2008 and 2021, she was placed under a controversial conservatorship against her objections.
After she was able to end the conservatorship, Spears said she wouldn't wish the 'pain' of it on anyone and was finding it 'extremely hard' to accept what her family did to her.