Melissa Joan Hart feels 'really guilty' for taking Britney Spears to first club: 'I should have known better'

"I saw that she was just surrounded by people, never able to break free," Hart recalled of a teenage Spears.

Melissa Joan Hart is conjuring up some regrets from her time spent hanging out with Britney Spears in her youth. Specifically, the Sabrina the Teenage Witch star harbors feelings of guilt over taking the pop star to her first-ever club.

The two first became friends when Hart starred in Spears' music video for "(You Drive Me) Crazy," when the singer was 17 and Hart was 23. "Britney and I got to do a lot of press together. And we had a lot of fun together during this time," Hart told ET in a new career retrospective interview. "I saw that she was just surrounded by people, never able to break free. And I was like, 'Hey want to come?'"

Hart told the outlet she didn't think anything of it, because she "would go to a club every night," noting, "I love dancing and I loved going out, but I also knew to be responsible and, like, when to stop."

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"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.' And yeah — and I feel really guilty about that still to this day because I should have known better, being a big sister," Hart told ET.

As documented persistently in the tabloids, Spears struggled with partying in the early 2000s, and eventually was put under a highly contentious conservatorship under her father, Jamie, after she had a public breakdown in late 2007 and early 2008. The conservatorship was terminated in November 2021 after the much publicized #FreeBritney movement and the premiere of Samantha Stark's documentary Framing Britney Spears.

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Naturally, Hart and Spears drifted apart over the years, but the actress says she did make contact with the "Baby One More Time" singer in the recent past. "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," the actress said.

Hart can next be seen in the Lifetime movie The Bad Guardian, which premieres on May 18.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.