Kevin Federline has been publicly berated, ridiculed and shamed, but has stayed admiringly silent – until now.

In his new tell all book K-Fed messes with the timeline, get’s his facts wrong and puts his finger on the scale to get his point across, but the only thing he proves is that he’s one of the guys stating the divorce “came out of nowhere” when even us readers can read between the coke lines that it didn’t. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s start at the beginning.

He starts it all off innocently enough with his childhood and coming up as a dancer, and dealing drugs before he sidesteps the timeline and says “more on that later.” An odd skip that denies the reader a natural progression. Instead he’s holding on to a story like an ace up his sleeve. 

The book is written how I would imagine K-Fed speaks, with pauses and explanations that aren’t thought all the way through. At the same time he has some admirable reflections and confessions. I’ll give him that, he admits he has shortcomings, he just doesn’t see how these lead to the consequences of his life. But more on that later. 

We’re quickly catapulted back to the early 2000’s Los Angeles music scene with K-Fed name-dropping his way through music video’s and tours. He has a more impressive CV than you might think, working with Pink, Michael Jackson, Aaliyah, Destiny’s child, Christina Milian, Justin Timberlake and LFO. It reminds us of the good old days, when the clubs were packed, the jeans were low and the music was thick and soulful. 

He meets Britney on the dancefloor, they hit it off, go to an afterparty at her hotel and don’t leave for 3 days. This is when he finds it fitting to state that he’s “always been a passive person” and “I avoid confrontation whenever I can.” Jump to – he was still together with Shar Jackson and she was pregnant with their *second child (*or third, since their first was a miscarriage) and he never let her know what he was up to. In fact he was so passive he just did what Britney told him to do, and went on tour with her. Lying to Shar telling her he booked a job in Europe. He admits to his shortcomings surrounding this, but he’s blind to how he’s still very much that guy. 

The honeymoon stage is basically him just hanging around, being “chill” and never saying no. Britney proposes, she plans their wedding, buys the houses, makes music and plans for kids. He never lifted a finger for any of it. Except his pinky when he repurposed her engagment ring that she bought herself, into a pinky wring for himself.

When she struggles after the pregnancies with what he assumes is post-partum depression, he checks out. He states that he just started working on his album and was absent all the time. This correlates to what Britney wrote in her memoir too. But this is where the discrepancies start. He kicks it all off with going back to his childhood and having a gun waved in his face to lean into his own trauma – that’s his springboard into not dealing with Britney being manic.

Through the good times, all is rosy, but as soon as the bad times come knocking Kevin starts thinking about things he never thought about before. All of a sudden he wants agency of the household, his career – and the optics. And his most valuable pawns in the game are the kids.  Britney’s memory of the period is heartbroken, lonely, confused, and sad. Kevin’s memory is full of factual errors you can easily look up. He even gets their ages wrong when he says the first time they met he didn’t have any interest in her because he was 21 and she was 16. But he was born in 1978 and she was born in 1981, so that’s only 3 years in between, where he got the other 2 is a mystery, but these errors make it look like exaggerating is second nature to him. (Why didn’t he bother fact checking?)

Because he states that she sprung the divorce on him, to no fault of his own. She said they told her he was going to file for divorce, but urged her to get ahead of it because the optics would be better for Kevin and she complied. (Now you can ask yourself why there wasn’t a conversation had between husband and wife, but there wasn’t – this they both agree on.) 

He claims she came storming to his house with 50 paparazzo’s, manic, climbing the fence to see the kids – until she went to a hairdresser instead and shaved her head and attacked a car with an umbrella. (This did not happen on the same day, and that’s easy to look up.) Britney is ashamed of this and explains it as her being sick with grief after losing a family member. Regardless, their stories go in opposite directions from there. 

The contradictions and the double standards start  flying around and it shows that Federline has absolutely no self awareness. First he berates Britney for being crazy and out of control doing a line of coke at his release party. And since she’s such a danger to the kids he gets full custody. Once that’s settled and he feels like the winner, he completely forgets his measurement of a good parent: don’t do drugs – and says he not only did cush, mushrooms and coke, but went out and partied like – and I quote “strippers blowing cocaine in each other’s asses,guys tag-teaming chicks in my hot tub, a bordello masquerating as a porn studio masquerading as a dental office don’t even get me started. I was young. Freshly single. Flashing my fame a bit. ” Ok, father of the year.

He makes it a point to mention “when he didn’t have the kids” but when would that be K-Swizzle, if you had full custody? This happens a lot. He talks about everything he did while he didn’t have the kids, the 50/50 split and him having full custody. The logistics change with every chapter, every sentence and how it best fits his story. 

He decides over and over again that the kids have to come first, and then he goes out and parties. Then he has an awakening that the kids have to come first, then he gets a reality TV offer and takes off. He decides he has to be the constant, because Britney is so erratic and is always touring. Then he gets a gig in Australia and takes off for five months. Zero. Self. Awareness. 

He admits to not wanting to know anything about her conservatorship, then proceeds to tell the kids that it’s not that bad. “Yes, there were controls in place, but they weren’t as severe as she made them out to be.” Excuse me, what? Having a forced IUD isn’t severe? Not being allowed to move freely or spend your own money how you want to isn’t severe? 

If I have learned anything from reading Britney’s and Fedeline’s memoirs it is this: they both try to convince us they are the victim, when the only real victims here are the kids. And I mean all of them, not just the two between Kevin and Britney.  When he play acts “stay at home dad”, it’s only for the benefit of Britney’s sons. And let’s be real, he never really stayed at home for them either. Between the strip clubs, the event gigs, reality TV shows  and hanging with the boyz and the forty plus women they brought along, he was most concerned with taking care of Kevin. And this isn’t conjecture – he wrote it in the memoir!!! Black on white, it’s right there – he partied, he did drugs (all of them!), he partied some more, he left the country for five months to do a show, he partied in Vegas, he threw parties at home and then he was paid to party some more.

In the end he says he’s grown, but then again so has his kids, they’re not kids anymore but grown men. Some say, or who am I kidding, everybody is saying this is a cash grab because he’s not receiving child support anymore. And maybe it is, but Britney in her memoir never really owned up to the part she played in her own demise, and still continues to play today. She has simply turned off all the comments on her instagram and lives in ignorant bliss, dancing with knives on her marble floors.

This is the only part I think Kevin got right, towards the end – he pleads with the public and the free Britney movement specifically, to step in and save Britney now, before it’s too late. He begs the extremists to leave the kids alone, and this is one thing we should all agree on. The kids are off limits. Until they step into the limelight themselves, and both their parent’s have stated they definitely have the talent to do so. Let’s wish them the best on their journeys.

Is the book a literary masterpiece? No, of course it’s not, but it is a memoir and I believe it’s true to his voice and character. Is it factually true? Also no, but I do believe it’s emotionally true for Kevin. It has amazed me that he has stayed silent for so long and now I know why; he didn’t really have anything to add. He had a few good years with Britney, a footnote in her bio, and two kids. If they didn’t have kids he would have been as irrelevant as Jason Alexander that she was married to for 55 hours.