Jamie Lynn Spears cries recalling how 'people' didn't want her to have a baby at 16
Living in an Australian jungle has Jamie Lynn Spears getting raw about the challenges she experienced when she became pregnant with her first child, Maddie Aldridge, at 16 years old.
In Monday's episode of the British TV show "I'm A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!" Spears, 32, cried as she opened up about her first pregnancy to fellow contestant Fred Sirieix, a French reality TV veteran.
"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," Spears said. "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."
Spears has previously stated that she became pregnant in 2007 months after filming wrapped on the popular Nickelodeon show, and it didn't cause the show's demise.
When Sirieix asked about her parents, Spears said, "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."
As Spears lay in a hammock, tears leaked out of the corners of her eyes while she recounted her parents' reaction to her pregnancy. "When I first got pregnant, they didn't want me to have the baby – just a lot of people around me," she said.
"What you've done is amazing," Sirieix reassured her. "You have so much strength of character to do what you did."
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This experience encouraged her to emancipate herself so "I could make my own decisions," Spears told Sirieix. When her parents thought she was going to doctor's appointments, she was secretly meeting with a lawyer.
"My poor mom. We put her through it," Spears said of the time her lawyer showed up at the family home. "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 mom responded, "Just go, baby. Just go," Spears recounted. "It was the first time where ... I was in control."
"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," Spears said. She "had to go hide away" in a gated house in Mississippi due to "relentless" press coverage, but it didn't stop the paparazzi from taking photos of her "in the middle of nowhere."
"I wanted my baby to be normal," she said.
When Sirieix struck up a conversation with Spears about her "superstar" family in Episode 2 of "I'm A Celebrity," now in its 23rd season, she explained, "I think every family fights and has their stuff. I talked to (Britney Spears) before I came here. We love each other."
In an interview with producers, Spears reflected on her conversation with her co-star. "I'm proud of where I'm at now," said Spears, who married Jamie Watson in 2014 and welcomed her second daughter, Ivey Joan Watson, in 2018.
She added, "I don't share it in a way of being, like, sad or crying about it, but I'm just really thankful."
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