It sounds like Britney Spears wasn’t the only child to have a contentious relationship with Jamie Spears. Britney’s sister Jamie Lynn, whose new memoir — Things I Should Have Said — recently revealed her parents pushed her to get an abortion, and now she’s recalling the “terrible” tension she had with her dad after becoming pregnant with daughter Maddie in 2007, when she was just 16 years old.
“There was a whole lot of fighting going on between everyone involved,” Jamie Lynn, 30, writes in an excerpt published by PEOPLE on Nov. 9. “The entire Spears team was already caught up in my sister’s PR difficulties, and everyone around me just wanted to make this ‘issue’ disappear.”
Jamie goes on to say that her father’s alleged anger “brought out the sense of dread everyone felt about my situation.” She reveals that her family took her out of school and took her phone away in hopes of preventing any leaks to the press. “My daddy and I stopped speaking and the tension was terrible,” Jamie Lynn writes, according to PEOPLE.
Jamie Lynn explains that she didn’t back down, and her team eventually talked about taking her to Mercy Ministries, a home for unwed mothers in Tennessee, where she could “eventually give up my baby for adoption.”
“Daddy and I fought, slinging words and tossing insults. He grabbed me by the shoulders and held on tightly in the hopes of bending me to his will. I got in his face and yelled, ‘NO! I won’t go.’ I couldn’t deal with any of them. I ran away from them, panting with rage,” she writes.
Jamie Lynn also claims that she was asked to keep her pregnancy a secret from Britney — she was told it was “too risky to tell Britney about the baby.”
“I needed her more than ever and she wasn’t able help me in my most vulnerable time,” Jamie Lynn writes, before alleging “Britney’s condition was spiraling into something more concerning. They were concerned her instability at that time made her untrustworthy.”
“I went along with what my team told me to do because I was a minor and didn’t want to create any more issues,” she adds. “Britney learned of the pregnancy when the article was released. To this day, the hurt of not being able to tell my sister myself lingers.”
HollywoodLife reached out to Jamie Spears’ team for a comment on this news, but we didn’t receive an immediate response.
Jamie Lynn and her ex, Casey Aldridge, welcomed Maddie, now 13, into the world in 2008. Following their split, Jamie Lynn went on to marry her current husband, Jamie Watson, in 2014. They share a three-year-old daughter named Ivey.
Want more? Jamie’s new book will be released on January 18.