Melissa Joan Hart Says She “Still To This Day” Feels “Really Guilty” About Taking Britney Spears to Her First Club When Spears Was Still Underage

Britney Spears and Melissa Joan Hart — (Image credit: Getty Images)

Melissa Joan Hart is the star of Clarissa Explains It All, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Britney Spears’ music video for “(You Drive Me) Crazy” (and the film Drive Me Crazy, too). And of Spears, Hart said, per Entertainment Weekly, that she feels “really guilty” for an incident involving the performer from around that time—taking Spears to her first club.

Hart and Spears first became friends after that music video shoot, when Hart was 23 and Spears just 17. “Britney and I got to do a lot of press together,” Hart said. “And we had a lot of fun together during this time. I saw that she was just surrounded by people, never able to break free. And I was like, ‘Hey, want to come?’”

Hart said she didn’t think anything of it, because she “would go to a club every night,” adding “I love dancing and I loved going out, but I also knew to be responsible and, like, when to stop.”

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Of Spears—who, as mentioned before, wasn’t yet 18—“She was underage and young and—but I [was] just like, ‘Let’s go out. We’re just gonna go out and have some fun,’” Hart said. “And, yeah—and I feel really guilty about that still to this day because I should have known better, being a big sister.”

As Entertainment Weekly writes, “As documented persistently in the tabloids, Spears struggled with partying in the early 2000s.” (Not to suggest this was Hart’s fault at all, by the way.) Hart and Spears drifted apart over the years, but Hart said she did make contact with her recently: “I saw her when she was doing her Vegas residency a few years back, but she was doing her show, so, you know, it was a quick hello backstage and that was it,” she said.

Spears’ first night at a club at 17 years old wasn’t her first exposure to alcohol, though. As she detailed in her memoir The Woman In Me (released last October), Spears drank with her mother, Lynne, at a young age, as early as the eighth grade: “I loved that I was able to drink with my mom every now and then,” Spears wrote. “The way we drank was nothing like how my father did it. When he drank, he grew more depressed and shut down. We became happier, more alive and adventurous.”

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Rachel Burchfield is a writer, editor, and podcaster whose primary interests are fashion and beauty, society and culture, and, most especially, the British Royal Family and other royal families around the world. She serves as Marie Claire’s Senior Celebrity and Royals Editor and has also contributed to publications like Allure, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle, People, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and W, among others. Before taking on her current role with Marie Claire, Rachel served as its Weekend Editor and later Royals Editor. She is the cohost of Podcast Royal, a show that was named a top five royal podcast by The New York Times. A voracious reader and lover of books, Rachel also hosts I’d Rather Be Reading, which spotlights the best current nonfiction books hitting the market and interviews the authors of them. Rachel frequently appears as a media commentator, and she or her work has appeared on outlets like NBC’s Today Show, ABC’s Good Morning America, CNN, and more.