Justin Timberlake has turned off his Instagram comments

The singer has been criticised for his alleged treatment of Britney Spears, after they dated in the early Noughties

Justin Timberlake appears to have turned the comments off on his Instagram posts, after coming under scrutiny over anecdotes featured in Britney Spears‘ first memoir, The Woman in Me.

The singer’s portrayal in Spears’s book has been one of the key talking points surrounding its publication.

Timberlake, 42, and Spears, 41, dated each other for three years before they broke up in 2002, amid speculation that the “Baby One More Time” singer had cheated on him.

In The Woman in Me, Spears confirmed the infidelity rumours, revealing she kissed her choreographer Wade Robson.

However, she claims that Timberlake was also unfaithful. “There were a couple of times during our relationship when I knew Justin had cheated on me,” the “Toxic” singer wrote.

Spears explained how her “infatuation” with Timberlake caused her to justify and overlook his alleged infidelity.

“There were rumours about him with other dancers and groupies. I let it all go, but clearly, he’d slept around,” she wrote. “It was one of those things where you know but you just don’t say anything.”

“So I did, too. Not a lot – one time, with Wade Robinson,” she continued.

Spears also revealed that she had an abortion when she was with Timberlake and had initially considered keeping it.

“I loved Justin so much. I always expected us to have a family together one day,” she wrote. “This would just be much earlier than I’d anticipated.”

Timberlake with Spears in 2002 (Getty Images)

However, she alleged that Timberlake did not agree. “But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy,” she wrote. “He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.

“If he didn’t want to become a father, I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice.”

The Independent has reached out to Timberlake’s representatives for comment.

The revelations in The Woman in Me have prompted a major backlash against Timberlake on social media. Before he turned off the comments on his Instagram page, fans of Spears had been bombarding his comments section with abusive or negative remarks.

A source told Page Six that the *NSYNC member made the decision to turn the comments off because of the “hateful, disgusting things people were saying” on his page.

In a four-star review, The Independent praised Spears’s book as “a portrait of a woman no longer in the eye of the storm but surveying, dazed and indignant, the wreckage left in its wake”.