Kevin Federline is naming names.
In his new memoir, You Thought You Knew, the former backup dancer calls out Rosie O’Donnell, Jimmy Kimmel and other celebrities who publicly mocked him during his divorce from Britney Spears.
“The gossip, the rumors and the public ridicule, it’s all like a high school drama on a massive scale. And while I was lucky to have a strong sense of self by the time fame hit, there were still moments that got to me,” he writes in the book, which was released on Tuesday, October 21.
Federline, 47, acknowledges that he “expected” Spears’ “most loyal supporters” to “lash out” at him, but he was taken aback when other stars followed suit.
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“What stung was when people in the industry, the so-called Hollywood elites, jumped on the bandwagon without knowing me at all,” he continues. “When someone like Ben Stiller or Rosie O’Donnell makes a jab, it feels personal. It’d be one thing if they were strangers, but these were people in the same world, people who should understand how damaging words can be. They had no clue who I really was, yet still felt entitled to publicly judge me.”
Federline admits he was an “easy target” as someone who was “attached to one of the biggest stars on the planet,” but he insists he was more than “just some random guy riding [Spears’] coattails.”
“Hearing Jimmy Kimmel or whoever else make a joke at my expense did bother me,” he writes. “It wasn’t devastating, but it was frustrating. It made me feel like I was stuck in this caricature, like my life was some kind of Jerry Springer episode for people to laugh at.”
The day after Spears, 43, filed for divorce from Federline in 2006, O’Donnell, 63, famously popped confetti on The View and shouted, “Let me just say on behalf of a happy America: Welcome back, Britney! We love you!”
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Later that month, Kimmel, 57, poked fun at Federline’s brief rap career while hosting the American Music Awards and then performed a skit in which he sealed a K-Fed look-alike in a wooden crate and threw it in the ocean.
“That moment summed up how the industry treated me, like I was something to be laughed at, thrown away and forgotten,” Federline writes in his memoir of Kimmel’s bit. “That hurt. It’s one thing to deal with the tabloids, but it’s another when the ridicule comes from people you once respected or people who should know better.”
Us Weekly has reached out to reps for O’Donnell and Kimmel for comment.
Much of You Thought You Knew chronicles Spears and Federline’s whirlwind two-year marriage, high-profile divorce and struggles coparenting their two sons, Sean Preston, 20, and Jayden James, 19.
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Spears, who stopped paying Federline $40,000 a month in child support only last year, has slammed the tell-all as a money grab.
“Trust me, those white lies in that book, they are going straight to the bank and I am the only one who genuinely gets hurt here,” she wrote in an X post on October 15.
That same day, Federline denied Spears’ assertion, exclusively telling Us, “Money’s not the root of this thing. I feel like, if she has the right to tell her story [in her 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me], why don’t I?”
