AJ McLean: I Believe in Britney Spears 110%

A.J. McLean: I Believe in Britney Spears 110%



FRIDAY JANUARY 18, 2008 01:20 PM EST
By Shayna Rose Arnold and Nicholas White


Photo by: Jon Kopaloff / FilmMagic; Anthony / PacificCoastNews
Britney Spears is getting another offer of help – this time from Backstreet Boy A.J. McLean


"I believe in her 110 percent, but she needs to call [me]," the
pop star, 30, told PEOPLE Thursday at the Hysteric Glamour VIP preview
party. "If her publicist or somebody can get in touch with me, I just
want to sit down with her and have it out."

Asked what he'd offer to Spears, McLean says, "First I would
say, 'What the hell is wrong with you?' Second I would say, 'What is
really wrong with you? What are you not saying to everybody else?' "

McLean,
a recovering alcoholic who also happened to rise to fame around the
same time as Spears, says he thinks he knows part of what the
26-year-old star is going through.

"She has given people hints of her troubles, but fear is a
really big thing, and depression. ... I've been through it. I'm coming
up on six years sober," he said at the party hosted by Tracey Ross at
her Sunsent Plaza store in West Hollywood. "I just want to sit her down
and pick her brain."


'Do You Want to Die?'

Ultimately, McLean says he
believes the troubled singer wants to – and can – get her life back in
order. " [I want to be] just someone who can tell her straight. I'll
say, 'Hey, do you want to die? Is that what you want?' If that is what
she really wanted, she would have done it already. I know that is not
what she wants," he says.


McLean also said Spears's pregnant 16-year-old sister Jamie Lynn has had a rough go but will be okay.


"You look at Jamie Lynn now and it is like, of course, she has
no one to look up to," McLean says. "But I think she has a chance.
Everyone has a chance to turn it around."