Jamie Lynn Spears is opening up about the hardships and backlash she felt when she was pregnant at 16.
USA Today reports via an interview of the British TV show “I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!”, where Spears sobbed as she recalled the first time she was pregnant to contestant Fred Sirieix, a French reality TV veteran when she was 16. She said, “After I finished ‘Zoey (101)’, I had, you know, the love of my life – (or that) is what I would’ve thought – and I got pregnant. And I decided to keep the baby,” she added to this, “The whole world was like, ‘You’re a slut. You’re horrible. Your life’s over.’ … Because I got pregnant young. I was on a kids’ show.”
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When Sirieix asked about how her parents felt at the time, she replied, “They had a lot going on, but I think they were just sad that I was in that situation. But also, it’s your baby having a baby.” She recalled her parents’ demeanor during the episode (via USA Today), while she was lying on a hammock with tears spilling out of the sides of her face, saying, “When I first got pregnant, they didn’t want me to have the baby – just a lot of people around me.”
To this, Sirieix reassured her of her bravery, saying, “What you’ve done is amazing,” adding, “You have so much strength of character to do what you did.” This horrendous experience with no one by her side acted as an emancipatory elixir so “I could make my own decisions.” She confessed on the episode that while she told her parents she was visiting the doctor, she was, in fact, conversing with her lawyer on the matter.
According to USA Today, she then recalled the day everything came face-to-face when the lawyer showed up at her parent’s home, saying, “My poor mom. We put her through it,” adding, “She didn’t want me to do that because she knew that would mean I would probably marry the father’s child and lose my fortune that I’d amassed over the years working since I was very young.” Spears was engaged to Casey Aldridge, Maddie’s father, between 2008 and 2010.
Her mother had responded to this fiasco by saying, “Just go, baby. Just go,” to which Spears recalled, “It was the first time where … I was in control.” She continued her story, saying, “Everybody told me I was going to be a horrible mom, so I was like, ‘I gotta raise my baby by myself.’ And so I did,” adding, “I wanted my baby to be normal.” She recollected that in order to escape the ruthless media, she and her baby “had to go hide away” in a gated house in Mississippi, but that still did not stop the paparazzi from taking photos of her “in the middle of nowhere.”
USA Today collects information that in an interview with the producers of the show, she recollects her conversation with her co-star. “I’m proud of where I’m at now.” Spears married Jamie Watson in 2014 and welcomed her second daughter, Ivey Joan Watson, in 2018.