The year is 2004, and celebrity privacy has died in its Hollywood home, sources told TMZ. Tabloid culture, where the exploitation of a celebrity's life goes for $2.50 a pop at your local supermarket, went dot-com in the early 2000s.
With the internet, pop star gossip was as accessible as it had ever been. Search engines like Google and Yahoo! made it easy to know exactly what the most polarizing figures in the world were up to. And in 2010, Yahoo! reported that the most-searched public figure in the world in the 2000s wasn't a politician.
It wasn't an actor or actress, either. It was Britney Spears. By the turn of the century, Spears was already one of the biggest stars in the world, and the '00s turned her into the most obvious victim of the pre-social media gossip renaissance.
The singer's '90s records "...
Baby One More Time" and "Oops!...
I Did It Again," which came out when she was still a teen, went nuclear. To this day, they're two of the 50 best-selling albums of all time, with title track hits that devoured audience attention and barely scratched the surface of her hit-making talent. Spears was dubbed the "princess of pop," the next in line after Madonna's chart-topping, buzz-generating run in the '80s.
Britney Spears performs at The Mark of the Quad-Cities in 2004. Front-page magazine stories about Spears were ruthless. Nothing was off limits.
Outlets sensationalized stories about her relationship with *NSYNC star Justin Timberlake, her virginity, her marriage to per.
