Kevin Federline Needs to Keep Britney Spears’ Name Out of His Mouth and Get a

Last November, Britney Spears scored a landmark victory when Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Brenda Penny opted to end her conservatorship. After years of work from Spears herself, demonstrations from her most devout fans, a harrowing documentary from The New York Times, and, ultimately, the singer’s heart-shattering testimony in court, it appeared Spears had finally won her freedom.

When Spears stepped out of her conservatorship, the public and the media responded with an avalanche of mea culpas. Documentary after documentary had exposed how relentless professional pressure, combined with a tabloid culture devoid of empathy, had gradually but systematically broken the singer’s spirit. Viewers saw Spears’ public 2008 breakdown in a new light—not as a personal failing to be cruelly ridiculed, as it was at the time, but as a cry for help from a human being who, for most of her life, had been exploited for our entertainment.

Less than a year later, however, that old, familiar cruelty has already crept its way back into the Spears discourse. Consider, for instance, the conversation that’s unfolded in the wake of her ex-husband Kevin Federline’s recent insidious “reveals” about her.

On Monday, ITV began teasing its three-part interview with the former Mr. Spears. Federline said he believes the conservatorship “saved” his ex-wife—this in spite of Spears’ own allegations that she’d been forced into years of “therapy” with practitioners she never chose (which is not therapy at all); that her medications were forcibly changed as “punishment” for canceling her Las Vegas Domination residency; and that her conservators would not allow her to remove her IUD so that she could have a child. (That last claim constitutes reproductive coercion, according to Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Alexis McGill Johnson.)

Nevertheless, Federline persisted: “Jamie Spears came to me and was like, pretty much, I don’t know what to do, I want to help,” he told ITV. “I saw a man that really cared and really cares about his family and wanting everything to be OK.” (Never mind that Jamie Spears allegedly lived off his daughter’s wealth for years even before her conservatorship, which further siphoned her finances to pay for not only her own attorneys but his as well.)

More insidious, however, was Federline’s decision to discuss Spears’ relationship with their two sons, Sean and Jayden, both of whom are still teenagers in high school. Federline implied that Spears’ Instagram posts—in which she occasionally poses nude, censored with emojis—embarrassed their sons.

“I apologize for them, to them, for them because I can’t imagine how it feels to be a teenager, having to go to high school,” Federline said. “Who knows how many people ask them about it or talk to them about it?… I try to explain to them look, maybe [it’s] just another way she tries to express herself but it doesn’t take away from the fact that what it does to them, it’s tough.”

Spears’ husband, Sam Asghari, responded to Federline’s comments with a statement in which he pointed out, “Even if there was truth to her kids being ashamed of their mother’s choices and positive body image they wouldn’t be the first teenagers embarrassed of their parents.”

Then came the most explosive comments: Federline mentioned that Sean and Jayden are “not seeing [Spears] right now” and haven’t for “months” since they’d skipped her wedding this summer. “There’s a lot of things that were going on that they just didn’t feel comfortable with,” he said. “They made sure that I knew what was going on… they started sending me videos and certain things that they were like, look, I’m telling you that this is happening.”

What, exactly, “this” is remains unclear.

In a now-expired statement posted on her Instagram Story, Spears wrote, “It saddens me to hear that my ex-husband has decided to discuss the relationship between me and my children… As we all know, raising teenage boys is never easy for anyone. It concerns me the reason is based on my Instagram. It was LONG before Instagram. I gave them everything… Only one word: HURTFUL.” In a subsequent post, Spears called her sons “hateful” and claimed they never wanted to spend time with her during their visits.

That was all it took for Federline to double down. “I can not sit back and let my sons be accused in this way after what they’ve been through,” Federline said. (Apparently he forgot that it was his own interview about their kids that prompted Spears’ comments.) “The lies have to stop,” Federline said. “I hope our kids grow up to be better than this.”

And so, Federline shared a handful of supposedly…