“Something I never shared when I had that big breakup years ago was that I couldn’t talk afterward. I never spoke to anyone for a long time …I was in shock,” she added, “pretty lame of my dad and three men to show up at my door when I could hardly speak … two days later they put Diane Sawyer in my living room … they forced me to talk !!!”
In 2003 Sawyer hit Britney with her high-profile breakup with boyfriend Justin Timberlake. For some reason, Sawyer seemed to take sides. And she blamed Britney. Sawyer asked Spears, “You did something that caused him so much pain, so much suffering. What did you do?”
ABC spent a lot of time focusing on Spears’ body and wardrobe. Sawyer said that the space between the superstar’s midriff and belly button ring was “the most valuable square inch of real estate in the entertainment universe.”
And she even claimed that Spears was “getting burned by the fire she lit herself.”
The interview ended when the star began to cry. But the cameras kept rolling to capture her breakdown after she asked to stop the interview.
A media history of shaming women
From the 1960s through the 1990s it was all about audience share. And in the early 2000s, it became about clicks and pics with the new wave of 24-hour journalism.
