Asghari, a model and actor, met Spears while playing her love interest in a music video for “Slumber Party” in 2016. The couple delighted fans with social media selfies and got engaged in September 2021 — weeks before Spears succeeded in dissolving a 13-year conservatorship that had granted her father extensive control over her finances and personal life. Fans who helped fuel the “Free Britney” movement were outraged over the conservatorship, which Spears said prevented her from getting married or having children without her father’s consent.

Spears and Asghari announced in May last year that they had lost a child early in her pregnancy. They held a storybook-style wedding at their home outside Los Angeles the next month, with a horse-drawn carriage and a star-studded guest list including Madonna and Donatella Versace, according to Harper’s Bazaar.

But the honeymoon period didn’t last long. A TMZ documentary this year suggested their marriage was in trouble and alleged that Spears “got physical” with her new husband. In an Instagram video he later deleted, Asghari lashed out at media outlets for obsessing over Spears’s personal life, which included a mental breakdown and hospital stays in the 2000s that prompted the conservatorship.

“Now, all of a sudden, after 15 years, she’s free after all those gaslighting and all those things that went down, now you’re going to put her under a microscope and tell her story? No. That’s also disgusting,” Asghari said.

Asghari is Spears’s third husband, after Kevin Federline, whom she was married to from 2004 to 2007.

Her first marriage, to childhood friend Jason Allen Alexander, lasted less than 72 hours in 2004. Alexander was charged with trespassing after he crashed her wedding with Asghari last summer.

Representatives for Spears and Asghari did not immediately respond to requests for comment.