Jada Pinkett Smith has celebrated the release of Britney Spears’s new memoir, inducting the singer into the ‘Bad Ass Women Memoir Club’ with a throwback Instagram post.
Pinkett Smith, 52, released her own memoir Worthy, earlier this month, making several shock revelations about her marriage to Will Smith, her friendship with Tupac Shakur, and the Oscars slap that was heard around the world.
The host of Red Table Talk congratulated Spears, 41, on Tuesday (24 October), as the Grammy-winner’s eagerly anticipated memoir The Woman in Me was released worldwide.
To mark the date, Pinkett Smith shared a throwback video of her band Wicked Wisdom opening for Spears’s The Onyx Hotel tour in 2004, on Instagram.
She captioned her post: "Welcome to the ‘Bad Ass Women Memoir Club.
“Britney Spears welcomed me to open for her on the Onyx tour with my band Wicked Wisdom with open arms,” the actor continued. “She was so sweet and supportive. Who knew we would be back on a different stage, sharing our journeys on the page.”
Pinkett Smith formed nu metal band Wicked Wisdom in 2002, with Pocket Honore, Cameron “Wirm” Graves, Philip “Fish” Fisher, and Rio Lawrence. The band released two albums and, notably, opened for Spears during her fifth concert tour to promote her album In the Zone.
The “...Baby One More Time” singer admitted she thought the fan-favourite Onyx tour was “too sexual, for a star”, in The Woman in Me, adding that “I hated it in the moment”.
“I felt like I’d been manipulated into going straight back to work after the breakup with Justin [Timberlake], because it was all I knew,” she writes in the book, according to an excerpt published by Page Six.
“The Onyx tour was a mistake. But in my mind I thought I should just do what I was supposed to do, which was work.”
Spears dated the NSYNC frontman from 1998 until 2002, after the pair met when they were cast onThe Mickey Mouse Club.
In her book, Spears also revealed she had an abortion during her relationship with Timberlake because he was “so sure that he didn’t want to be a father”.
“To this day, it’s one of the most agonising things I have ever experienced in my life,” she writes in the memoir, chronicling two decades of Spears’s tumultous life in the spotlight.
“The princess of pop” gives fans an unflinching look at her past romantic relationships – including a two-week fling with Colin Farrell that Spears compares with a “street brawl” – and her treatment during the 13-year conservatorship under her father Jamie Spears.
In the run-up to the release of Pinkett Smith’s book, it was sensationally revealed she and her husband, the King Richard star Smith had been living separate lives since 2016.
