Justin Timberlake has finally addressed a rumor that has followed one of his biggest songs for nearly two decades. The singer says “What Goes Around…Comes Around” is not about his own life, despite years of speculation that it was aimed at his ex, Britney Spears.
Timberlake, 45, cleared the air during a Thursday, November 5, interview with Complex in which he ranked his best songs. Asked about the 2006 single, he said the story behind it belongs to someone else.
“I think, maybe I should dispel a rumor 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 that I asked permission to [use],” Timberlake explained.
He then described the phone call that sparked the idea, revealing his friend was going through a rough time and was telling him what had happened when Timberlake asked if he could write about it.
“And I quote, my friend said, ‘Yeah, torch that b—h, what goes around comes around,’” he continued. “And I was like, ‘I have to go, thank you.’ He was like, ‘What?’ I was like, ‘I got it.’ And I hung up the phone and so I had the idea.”
Timberlake eventually released the song on December 19, 2006, as the third single from FutureSex/LoveSounds. It became Timberlake’s third consecutive number one on the Billboard Hot 100 from the album, with its music video having crossed half a billion views on YouTube.
The Samuel Bayer-directed video, starring Scarlett Johansson as Timberlake’s love interest, won Best Direction at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards and was nominated for Video of the Year. The song also earned Timberlake the Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.
The song’s themes of betrayal and forgiveness are a big reason the Spears theory took hold. Fans had already linked Timberlake’s music to the split after “Cry Me a River,” the 2002 single from his debut solo album Justified, which follows a man moving on from a partner who wronged him.
When “What Goes Around…Comes Around” arrived four years later with a similar story of a cheating lover, many assumed he was revisiting the same relationship. But as we now know, the hit was inspired by a friend’s heartbreak rather than his own.
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Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears Relationship Timeline
Timberlake and Spears met as kids on The All-New Mickey Mouse Club and dated from 1999 to 2002. According to Spears, Timberlake ended the relationship with a two-word text while she was shooting a music video.
Timberlake released “Cry Me a River” later that year, and its video featured a Spears look-alike playing the unfaithful girlfriend. In her 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me, Spears said the video and the press fallout painted her as a “harlot” and cast Timberlake as the wronged party.
However, she also acknowledged being unfaithful during the relationship and wrote that she became pregnant during their time together and had an abortion. In January 2024, she eventually apologized to Timberlake for some of what she wrote about him.
Meanwhile, Tmberlake had publicly apologized to Spears in February 2021, after the Framing Britney Spears documentary renewed criticism of how she was treated by the media and by the men in her life, Timberlake included. He said he had benefited from a culture that let men get away with misogynistic behavior and that he had failed to speak up for her.
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