Nobody Cares About You, Kevin Federline

Kevin Federline is a loser. This is hardly the shock of the century, and it’s not a new development, although cries of the L word have filled the air since he decided to publish a memoir of his life that mostly exists to throw dirt at his ex-wife, Britney Spears. The book offers some sleazy tidbits about her life, health, and relationship with their children (he has six kids from three different women). Reviews have been thin on the ground and acclaim non-existent (shout out to the Fug Girls for making the sacrifice and reading it for our sakes.) Sales are harder to gauge, but one report claims it’s a massive flop, and Amazon rankings seem to back that up. Whatever grand payday he was hoping to cash in is unlikely to happen.

It shouldn’t be a big surprise to Federline, who has been known as a Grade-A loser from the moment he entered the public eye. He was always a joke, the backup dancer who ditched his partner and kids to latch onto the vulnerable pop star and milk her dry. He wanted to be a rapper but money couldn’t buy talent or charm. Everything he said or did made him seem like a creep and a mooch. He was yet another reason for the press and public to mock Britney: was she so much of a mess that she couldn’t tell what an obvious jackass her beau was?

When Spears had her highly publicized breakdown and lost legal control over her own life, Federline stepped in. It was the only time he garnered a modicum of positive publicity, for “stepping up” and looking after his own children. With Britney’s money, of course. The smartest thing he did in this period was go away. There was a bigger villain for Britney fans to focus on in the form of Jamie Spears, her father and the controller of her conservatorship. Her fans always called him out for using her as a full-time ATM while he seemed allergic to employment, but largely, Federline stayed out of the spotlight. It seemed like he understood how unwinnable his situation was to the world and sat out the narrative, which makes his decision to try and cash in on negative goodwill in 2025 all the more baffling.

It’s almost impressive how lacking in self-awareness Federline is, although that is a requirement of being a scrub: the wilful delusion of male ego and pathetic fragility, combined to make a figure of ridicule who the culture is eager to aid and abet. They even dare to call it a form of justice, feminism for men, if you will. It’s depressingly common to see the manosphere and all of its toxic offshoots position fathers doing the bare minimum as magnanimous in the face of evil womanhood. Yet even the most pathetic men don’t seem to be siding with Federline, so off-putting is his smarm.

But keeping his head in the sand of Britney’s money has also deafened him to the seismic change in attitudes towards not only Spears but an entire generation of wronged women. It’s not cool to root against Britney, no longer the status quo to mock her pain or call her a train wreck. Fleeting though it may have been, and few the lessons learned, but people did acknowledge the need to improve and apologize to her. The court of public opinion gave her a retrial, and the actual courts freed her from a conservatorship that greatly benefited Federline.

So, he may claim that his intentions are earnest when he reveals painful details of Spears’ mental illness, or that he has always been the good guy in this twisted tale, but it falls flat every time. In what world does the good guy do any of this? Well, our world, honestly. Bad men earn a lot of money and clout from getting the world to hate women. Maybe this would have worked 10 years ago. Perhaps our current cycle of mea culpas would have had to include apologies for reading KFed’s tacky book. I’m keenly aware of the many famous women against whom such tactics would work.

We will probably never figure out the right way to confront what happened to Spears and how we all engaged in a cycle of cultural shaming that led to a grown woman being all but held prisoner in the public eye for 13 years. Even now, as she tries to live a reasonably private life, we are stuck in a state of nosey concern that has swung drastically back into the tone of conspiracy that plagued her, fairly or otherwise, for most of her life. Frankly, it’s not fun or helpful to talk about Britney. It feels slimy to keep leering at a woman dealing with mental health issues and demanding that she provide us with content, which continues to be a clickbait favourite.

But that doesn’t mean we want any of it from her ex. Every snide comment or self-serving quote feels like he’s picking at a raw scab that will never heal. He wants to be the hero, which requires the narrative to have a villain. And we know who he has chosen to be his dragon, and why. The fact that both of the Federline-Spears kids are now over 18 and no longer dependent on child support paid by their mother to their father is clear in every move Federline makes. To demand admiration and gratitude from Spears’ fans is beyond parody. You’d think a man as broke as this would appreciate that shutting up is free.