Don’t believe everything you see on the internet. Cade Hudson, Britney Spears’s manager, has set the record straight regarding an Instagram comment he was reported to have made regarding a Saturday Night Live sketch about Spears’s memoir, The Woman in Me, featuring Chloe Fineman as the pop star. Over the weekend, various news outlets reported that Hudson had taken issue with the sketch, saying in an Instagram comment that the NBC show was “on life support” and that Fineman “isn’t funny.” But in an email to Vanity Fair, Hudson confirmed that the controversy “isn’t real at all.”
The sketch, featured in the November 11 episode hosted by a very game Timothée Chalamet, opens with Britney Spears, played by Fineman, talking about the process of picking a celebrity to read her audiobook. “My audiobook is read by the amazing Michelle Williams, but she wasn’t the only one who wanted to read it,” says Fineman, imitating Spears. Then the SNL cast breaks out their best celebrity impressions to read excerpts from Spears’s book, retelling Spears’s stories about everything from swimming in a pool with Kevin Federline to Justin Timberlake’s cringe-inducing run-in with Ginuwine. The celebrity impressions included Allison Janney (Heidi Gardner), John Mulaney (Sarah Sherman), Jada Pinkett Smith (Ego Nwodim), Neil deGrasse Tyson (Kenan Thompson), and expert impressionist Fineman doing triple duty as Natasha Lyonne, Julia Fox, and the evening’s host, Chalamet, who also participated in the sketch as his friend Martin Scorsese.
On Sunday, outlets including Deadline reported that Hudson criticized the sketch and Fineman’s impersonation in an Instagram comment. But in an email to Vanity Fair on Monday, Hudson clarified that he never criticized the sketch or SNL, explaining that the comment was left by a fake account impersonating his identity. “Unfortunately there’s a lot of fake impersonators in the Britney world and that was a meme created by one of them,” wrote Hudson. “This was made by a fan site and people thought it was me.”
He went on to say that Spears is a fan of both SNL and Fineman, who often impersonates Spears on the program. “She loves loves Chloe and SNL,” he wrote. “This isn’t real at all.”
The Woman in Me is currently number one on the New York Times bestseller nonfiction list, having sold 1.1 million copies in its first week. Emmy winner and Oscar nominee Michelle Williams, who narrates the audiobook, is receiving praise and Grammy buzz for her narration, with VF’s chief critic, Richard Lawson, calling it “the role of a lifetime” for the actor. A second volume of Spears’s memoir is reportedly in the works and is scheduled to hit stands in 2024.
This article has been updated with a statement from Cade Hudson.