Justin Timberlake has publicly refuted the idea that What Goes Around… Comes Around was inspired by Britney Spears.
The former NSYNC member, now 45, released the single in 2006, and plenty of fans speculated that it drew from his 2002 breakup with the Toxic singer—who was in the middle of divorcing Kevin Federline at the time—yet he now says the track came about after he discussed a breakup of a friend’s with him.
Speaking on Complex’s Re-Rank YouTube series, he said: “Maybe I should dispel a rumour at this point, which has gone around forever, which is like, it’s not a personal story from mine.
“It’s actually a personal story from a friend’s that I asked permission [to use].
“He was just going through [a break-up] and he was telling me what had happened, and I said, ‘Do you mind if I write about this?’ And I quote, my friend said, ‘Yeah, torch that b****. What goes around comes around.’ And I was like, ‘I have to go. Thank you.’”
Timberlake wrote the song in "damn near 20 minutes" and the track, which featured a ten-minute music video, “hit on all cylinders” for him.
Timberlake and Spears first met on The All-New Mickey Mouse Club as children and began dating in 1999.
In her 2023 memoir The Woman in Me, Spears criticized her ex-boyfriend over the music video for his Cry Me a River, in which he appeared with a woman who bore a resemblance to Spears, arguing it made her appear as a “harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy.”
She added: “I was comatose in Louisiana, and he was happily running around Hollywood.”
In the book, Spears also alleged Timberlake had cheated on her “several times” and claimed she had a termination when she was 19 because Timberlake “wasn’t happy” at the idea of becoming a father.
But in 2024, the 44-year-old star apologized to the SexyBack singer.
Alongside a clip of Justin performing with classroom instruments with friend Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, Spears wrote on Instagram: “I wanna apologize for some of the things I wrote about in my book. If I offended any of the people I genuinely care about I am deeply sorry…
“I also wanted to say I am in love with Justin Timberlake’s new song ‘Selfish’ [rose emoji] It is soo good and how come every time I see Justin and Jimmy together I laugh so hard ??? Ps ‘Sanctified’ is wow [starry eyed emoji] too.(sic)”
