Justin Timberlake Tore Janet Jackson's Costume on Live TV #superbowl #janetjackson #usa - Video

On February 1, 2004, Janet Jackson headlined the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show in Houston, with Justin Timberlake joining as a surprise guest. During the closing seconds of their duet on his song "Rock Your Body," right as he sang the lyric "gonna have you naked by the end of this song," he pulled part of her top, as they had planned for the performance. But it went wrong, accidentally exposing her chest for less than a second in front of an estimated 143 million viewers.

The fallout was immediate and lasting. The FCC fined CBS $550,000. Congress got involved. Timberlake called it a "wardrobe malfunction" and apologized on stage at the Grammy Awards weeks later, then performed there like nothing had happened. Meanwhile, Janet was quietly blacklisted across Viacom's own networks, MTV, VH1 and its radio stations, cutting her airplay and killing the promotion for her new album entirely. She was uninvited from that same year's Grammys. Timberlake's career barely slowed down, he went on to headline his own Super Bowl halftime show 14 years later. Jackson eventually rebuilt her career and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019, but the stark contrast between how each of them was treated became one of the most cited examples of double standards in the entertainment industry.