Britney's conservatorship gets the Ronan Farrow treatment

Has he flipped it back to his father yet? It’s the only reason he does any of this.

He has Frank’s eyes.

This is interesting. Contemplated skipping it out of Britney fatigue but it's definitely the biggest picture presented thus far.

By far. Finally we have the full story on what happened back then. This is solid reporting for sure.

What I don't get is why she hasn't been evaluated by doctors, rather than judges.

Seems rather simple to me. Get professionals to evaluate her competence and move on.

They could even go with one selected by the court, one selected by Brit, and one selected by conservator - best 2 out of 3.

OMG. I don’t give a fuck about Britney Spears.

R6 OMG. I don't give a fuck about Meghan Markle and her FUGLY husband, but trolls won't stop posting every time she farts. Yawn.

OP, that's behind a paywall. Care to post the goods?

It’s too long for that. Try clearing your cookies for the New Yorker and you should be able to access it.

r7 I agree in spirit, and I have always found the "royal family" boring, but just need to point out that Meghan Markle's husband is Prince Hot Ginge, and that nude photos exist that provide verificatia

“ At one point, Butcher recalled him bellowing, “I am Britney Spears!” It was a refrain she would hear him repeat often during the early years of the conservatorship, she said. Lynne, as Butcher remembered it, grew quiet”

Jamie Spears is such a psycho.

Any thoughts on Sam Lutfi? I'd always believed he was a big part of her downfall. Doesn't seem so bad here to Britney here.. his sister sneaking her a phone (in a gym sauna!) was very sweet. Could his motives be genuine? Courtney Love called him a "street hustler" and he advised Amanda Bynes' family to place her in a conservatorship.

Wow, that article is beyond disturbing. Yet, you will still have idiots calling Britney and everyone who ever questioned the conservatorship crazy.

R6, try this: If you’re not interested in a particular topic, don’t click on it and just keep scrolling.

There are two separate issues - whether Britney is actually competent and the judicial mechanisms and nefarious machinations that allowed them to keep her in the conservatorship.

Even if she's not competent, the tactics they used to maintain the conservatorship are appalling. If she's truly not competent to manage her affairs, it shouldn't take such draconian measure to maintain it. It should be abundantly obvious to anyone that she's so out of control that she requires such invasive and complete control over her life.

On June 22nd, Britney Spears’s management team started getting nervous. Spears, who is thirty-nine, has spent the past thirteen years living under a conservatorship, a legal structure in which a person’s personal, economic, and legal decision-making power is ceded to others. Called a guardianship in most states, the arrangement is intended for people who cannot take care of themselves. Since the establishment of Spears’s conservatorship, she has released four albums, headlined a global tour that grossed a hundred and thirty-one million dollars, and performed for four years in a hit Las Vegas residency. Yet her conservators, who include her father, Jamie Spears, have controlled her spending, communications, and personal decisions. In April, Spears had requested a hearing, in open court, to discuss the terms of the arrangement. It was scheduled for June 23rd. Members of Spears’s team, most of whom have had little or no direct contact with her for years, didn’t expect drastic changes to result. Two years earlier, in the midst of health struggles and pressure from Spears, Jamie had stepped down from his duties overseeing her personal life, and now the team thought that perhaps she wanted to remove him as the conservator of her !nancial affairs. Some of the team told reporters that they believed Spears liked the conservatorship arrangement, as long as her father wasn’t involved. Running the business of Britney had become routine: every Thursday at noon, about ten people responsible for managing Spears’s legal and business affairs, public relations, and social media met to discuss merchandise deals, song-license requests, and Spears’s posts to Instagram and Twitter. (“This is how it works without her,” one member of the team said.) Spears, according to her management, typically writes the posts and submits them to CrowdSurf, a company employed to handle her social media, which then uploads them. In rare cases, posts that raise legal questions have been deemed too sensitive to upload. “She’s not supposed to discuss the conservatorship,” the

On the eve of the hearing, according both to a person close to Spears and to law enforcement in Ventura County, California, where she lives, Spears called 911 to report herself as a victim of conservatorship abuse. (Emergency calls in California are generally accessible to the public, but the county, citing an ongoing investigation, sealed the records of Spears’s call.) Members of Spears’s team began texting one another frantically. They were worried about what Spears might say the next day, and they discussed how to prepare in the event that she went rogue. In court on the 23rd, an attorney for the conservatorship urged the judge to clear the courtroom and seal the transcript of Spears’s testimony. Spears, calling into the hearing, objected. “Somebody’s done a good job at exploiting my life,” she said, adding, “I feel like it should be an open-court hearing—they should listen and hear what I have to say.” Then, for the !rst time in years, Spears spoke for herself, sounding lucid and furious, talking so fast that the judge interjected repeatedly to tell her to slow down, to allow for accurate transcription. “The people who did this to me should not get away,” Spears said. Addressing the judge directly, she added, “Ma’am, my dad, and anyone involved in this conservatorship, and my management, who played a huge role in punishing me when I said no— Ma’am, they should be in jail.” For the next twenty minutes, Spears described how she had been isolated, medicated, !nancially exploited, and emotionally abused. She assigned harsh blame to the California legal system, which she said let it all happen. She added that she had tried to complain to the court before but had been ignored, which made her “feel like I was dead,” she said—“like I didn’t matter.” She wanted to share her story publicly, she said, “instead of it being a hush-hush secret to bene!t all of them.” She added, “It concerns me I’ve been told I’m not allowed to expose the people who did this to me.” At one point, she told the court, “All I want is to own my money, for this to end, and for my boyfriend to drive me in his fucking car.”

ing car.”

Spears’s remarks were incendiary but, for people familiar with the creation and the functioning of her conservatorship, not surprising. Andrew Gallery, a photographer who worked for Spears in 2008, attended the hearing, watching the lawyers’ faces on a monitor. “As she spoke, I wanted to scream, and gasp, and shout ‘What the fuck is going on?’ ” he said. “But the lawyers had no reaction. They just sat there.” The conservatorship was instituted by Spears’s family—in part out of real concerns about her mental health, people close to the family said. But the family was divided by money and fame, and Spears, in an underregulated part of the legal system, was stripped of her rights. She has fought for years to get them back. As a pop star, Spears sustained a multinational industry of managers, agents, producers, lawyers, publicists, and assorted hangers-on. As the subject of the conservatorship, she has provided for the livelihood of even more lawyers and other court-appointed professionals. Jacqueline Butcher, a former friend of the Spears family who was present in court for the conservatorship’s creation, said she regrets the testimony that she offered to help secure it. “At the time, I thought we were helping,” she said. “And I wasn’t, and I helped a corrupt family seize all this control.” Jamie Spears, who is sixty-eight, has graying hair and a hangdog demeanor. When he was thirteen, he endured an unimaginable tragedy: his mother committed suicide on the grave of one of her sons, who had died eight years earlier, at just three days old. In high school, Jamie was a basketball and football star; later, he worked as a welder and a cook. Lynne Spears, Britney’s mother, grew up with Jamie, in the small town of Kentwood, Louisiana. Sixty-six years old, she has a smile like Britney’s and thick dark hair with bangs. She used to run her own day-care center. Friends describe her as traditional and nonconfrontational. In a conversation in June, she was fastidiously polite as she declined to answer detailed questions about the case. She spoke in a whisper and apologized that she might have to hang up abruptly if other family members walked in and discovered her speaking to a reporter. “I got mixed feelings about everything,” she said. “I don’t know what to think. . . . It’s a lot of pain, a lot of worry.” She added, a little wryly, “I’m good. I’m good at de#ecting.” Jamie and Lynne eloped when she was twenty-one, and the marriage was

Lynne eloped when she was twenty-one, and the marriage was

troubled from the start: in divorce papers !led, then withdrawn, in 1980, less than two years before Britney’s birth, Lynne accused Jamie of cheating on her on Christmas Day. Jamie wrestled with alcoholism, going on benders so egregious that Lynne once shelled his cooler with a shotgun. But Jamie and Lynne worked together to make Britney, their second child, happy and a success. She was a born performer, a scene-stealer at dance recitals starting at age three. Her parents drove her to small dance competitions in Lafayette, then to larger ones in New Orleans. They borrowed money from friends to pay for gas to get her to auditions. Spears snagged an understudy role on Broadway and then a stint in the nineties version of “The Mickey Mouse Club.” When she was sixteen, she signed a six-album deal with Jive Records, thanks to an enterprising entertainment lawyer named Larry Rudolph, who became her manager. A precise and commanding dancer with an unmistakable vocal tone of sugary coyness, Spears emerged as a teen-pop singularity. In 1998, the music video for her début single, “. . . Baby One More Time,” featuring a sixteen-year-old Spears in a Catholic-schoolgirl out!t, exploded across American pop culture like !reworks on the Fourth of July. The pleated skirt and bare midriff were her idea—a fact that’s sometimes cited as evidence of her self-determination but might also suggest an intuition, common among teen-age girls, of the compromised power of sex appeal. Because Jamie and Lynne had two other children to look after, a family friend chaperoned Spears for much of her early career. But Spears remained close to her mother, and, in 2000, she built a four-and-a-half-million-dollar estate for Lynne in Kentwood. That year, according to “Through the Storm,” a memoir that Lynne published in 2008, Spears urged her mother to divorce her father, knowing that “years and years of verbal abuse, abandonment, erratic behavior, and his simply not being there for me had taken their toll,” Lynne writes. She and Jamie divorced in May, 2002, and Spears told People that it was “the best thing that’s ever happened to my family.” Spears had just broken up with Justin Timberlake, a fellow teen-pop icon, whom she had met when she was eleven, when they were both cast as Mouseketeers. The breakup destabilized her, people close to her remember; her status as half of a golden couple had become an integral part of her identity, and after the split her sex life became a regular topic in the news. She began going out

life became a regular topic in the news. She began going out

more and hanging out with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, forming a holy trinity for tabloid culture at its early-two-thousands peak. “The paparazzi were out of control,” Hilton recalled, of one night with Spears at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “Fighting over getting the shot, pushing each other against my car, scratching it with their cameras. It was overwhelming and frightening.” The hairdresser Kim Vo, Spears’s longtime colorist, remembers how, one day, as Spears was getting her hair done, a paparazzo scaled a wall and broke a salon window with his !st. Spears distracted herself with work—a relentless grind of dance rehearsals, studio sessions, photo shoots, stadium performances, long nights on the tour bus, and hotel check-ins before dawn. “The schedule was crazier and crazier,” Julianne Kaye, a makeup artist who worked with Spears in the early years, said. “She would have little breakdowns. She was always crying, saying, ‘I want to be normal.’ ” Spears blew off steam by partying: she smoked weed, used cocaine, took Molly with her dancers and jumped into the Mediterranean Sea. But the machinery around her only grew. When she toured, the crew took at least a dozen buses and !lled entire hotel #oors. In the spring of 2004, Spears met a dancer named Kevin Federline at a night club, and they were married within six months. Spears initially did not secure a prenuptial agreement, which prompted panic in her family. A considerable fortune was at stake. “Lynne lost her mind,” Butcher, the family friend, recalled. “They weren’t gonna allow the wedding to be made legal.” The marriage contract wasn’t signed until the month after the ceremony, when Federline legally agreed to limit his stake in Spears’s estate. But Spears seemed thrilled, and commissioned a photo shoot in which she dressed up as a French maid and served drinks to Federline, who wore a trucker hat, cargo shorts, and #ip-#ops. Spears wanted a family. “I’ve had a career since I was 16, have traveled around the world & back and even kissed Madonna!” she wrote on her Web site, two months after getting married. “The only thing I haven’t done so far is experience the closest thing to God and that’s having a baby. I can’t wait!” Spears’s !rst son, Sean Preston, was born ten months after the wedding. “Our life was running at 150,000 miles an hour,” Federline later told Us Weekly. “I’d walk into a club and get a table worth $15,000 a night with unlimited free drinking. . . . But everything got so crazy.” Spears had

been so sheltered that Paris Hilton had to show her how to use Google, according to a person who was there. She negotiated the hormonal and logistical turbulence of early motherhood while paparazzi, eager to monetize her mistakes, chased her down, pointing #ashbulbs and shouting provocations any time she left the house. After she was photographed driving with an infant Preston on her lap, she explained that she had been trying to get away from paparazzi—and besides, she added, she had grown up riding on her dad’s lap on country roads. A few months later, visibly pregnant and holding Preston, she stumbled while surrounded by photographers; the paparazzi kept shooting as she retreated to a café, cradled her baby, and cried. Spears had her second child, Jayden James, in September, 2006. Three weeks later, Federline took a private jet to Vegas to party with his friends. Spears !led for divorce in November, reportedly notifying Federline by text message. At a night club, he scrawled on a bathroom wall “Today I’m a free man—f**k a wife, give me my kids bitch!” He requested full custody. While the divorce was being adjudicated, he and Spears divided parental duties. Preston was a little more than a year old, and Spears was still nursing Jayden; she wanted to be with them all the time, and hated being at home without them. “I did not know what to do with myself,” she said later, in an MTV documentary. Spears and Federline both went out on their free nights, but Spears was the one who became the target of tabloid blood sport. (“mommy’s crying,” Us Weekly blared, over a full-page photo of Preston.) In February, 2007, she shaved off her hair, at a salon in Tarzana; !ve days later, she attacked a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella. The two incidents cemented her image as “crazy.” Both were precipitated by her driving to Federline’s house, trailed by photographers, and being refused access to her kids. Many people who were close to Spears during her early career suspect that she was dealing with postpartum depression, but none of them remembers anyone bringing it up with her. Some of the same people said that Spears was also struggling with drugs and alcohol. Her mother and Federline insisted that, if Spears wanted to spend more time with her children, she needed to go to rehab. In early 2007, she checked into a treatment center in Antigua, then checked out after just one day. The judge in the custody hearing, who had cited Spears’s “habitual, frequent uses of controlled substances and alcohol,” gave primary custody of the children to Federline, granting

Spears four days of visitation per week, under the eye of a court-ordered monitor named Robin Johnson. Around this time, Spears met Sam Lut!, a Hollywood operator with a knack for insinuating himself into the lives of turbulent female stars. Spears had recently parted ways with Larry Rudolph, her longtime manager, and she began to entrust her professional and private affairs to Lut!. Now forty-six, Lut! cuts a nondescript !gure: average height, occasionally goateed, favoring baseball caps and black T-shirts. Over coffee at a Los Angeles restaurant this spring, he said that Spears took to him in part because he told her that she didn’t have to work nearly as hard as she was. “She’d always believed there were massive consequences if she didn’t work, that she’d lose so much, and it blew her mind that she could just call the shots,” he said. “You want to cancel that meeting? Cancel it. You’re gonna lose !ve grand? Lose it. She’d walk into a car dealership, say she wanted something. I’d say, ‘Buy it.’ Her parents would say, ‘Why would you let her do that?’ But it’s an eighty-thousand-dollar car, not a yacht, and she just got !fteen million from Estée Lauder. Anyway, she’s an adult. I’m not gonna tell her that she can’t buy a fucking yacht.” (Lut! later assumed a similar role in the life of Courtney Love, who called him a “street hustler,” and he said that he advised Amanda Bynes’s family as they placed her in a conservatorship. He is currently subject to a !ve-year restraining order !led against him, in 2019, by a conservatorship lawyer, on Spears’s behalf.) Lut! brokered relationships with the paparazzi and on occasion invited them into Spears’s home, telling her that this would make them less adversarial. Spears started dating one of the photographers, Adnan Ghalib. Lut! claims that Ghalib gave Spears amphetamines. (Lut! has also been accused of giving her drugs, which he denies; Ghalib could not be reached for comment.) Spears’s housekeeper at the time paused when asked about Ghalib: “I wouldn’t be happy if my daughter dated him. That’s all I will say.” Other people recalled Ghalib treating Spears kindly, and said that the Spears family cruelly mocked him behind his back. Jamie had become close to Lou Taylor, a business manager who shares the Spears family’s Christian faith and whose husband is a pastor at an evangelical church. Taylor later raised the

possibility of putting Lindsay Lohan under a conservatorship, according to Lohan’s father; in a recent interview, Courtney Love said that Taylor tried to wrest control over her family’s estate. (In a statement, Charles Harder, a lawyer representing Taylor, said, “At no time did Ms. Taylor ever make any effort to put anyone into a conservatorship. Not Britney Spears. Not Lindsay Lohan. Not Courtney Love.”) Taylor, sources present at the time said, began attempting to contact Spears, efforts that Spears rebuffed. Spears had stopped sleeping and had begun behaving even more erratically. “The days she didn’t have the kids with her were hard,” the housekeeper said. “But, even then, she was never doing anything to hurt anyone. It was really hard for her, having the kids for just a few hours. When she had to say goodbye, it was very sad—I would carry one to the car, and she would take the other, and they would cry a lot, and she would cry, too.” Spears grew so lonely that she would sometimes ask the housekeeper if she could bring her own children to the house and stay the night. “She used to ask me if I was happy,” the housekeeper said. “And I used to say yes. And she would say, ‘I just want to be happy. I want to have a family. I want my kids to stay with me every day.’ ” Early in January, 2008, as a visit with her boys came to an end, Spears began to cry. “I just want to keep my kids with me,” she said. “Why do they have to go?” A bodyguard had arrived to take the kids back to Federline’s house. Every extra minute with them put her in violation of the custody agreement: she could either give up the kids at that moment or give up the right to see them later. Eventually, she handed Preston to the bodyguard, but she went into a bathroom with Jayden and refused to come out. According to Lut!, Federline’s lawyer called the police and the !re department, which in turn called an ambulance. News crews gathered outside the house, with anchors reporting live on the standoff. Four helicopters circled overhead. Lut! arrived to !nd the house !lled with cops and !remen wielding axes. “It looked like a murder scene,” he recalled. “I pushed past everyone and opened the bathroom door—it was ridiculous; the locks on that door didn’t even work—and there she was, standing, pacing, holding the sleeping baby. She was dressed for a night out, in Louboutins. The bath is running. You could see the light !lling up the bathroom from the choppers. I told her she needed to let Jayden go, and, as she’s about to hand me the kid, the !remen blow things up. They take the kid and bring a gurney and strap her down. She

didn’t say anything. She was just looking at me, staring at me.” Lut! was later told that it was a “5150”—an emergency psychiatric hold, in which a person having a mental-health episode can be involuntarily hospitalized. Paparazzi surrounded the ambulance and followed it to Cedars-Sinai hospital. One photographer posted a photo of Spears on the gurney to his Myspace account with the caption “Cha-ching! Cha-ching!!” Federline was granted immediate sole custody of the children, and Spears’s visitation rights were suspended. It was widely assumed that Spears had endangered her children, but those who were around them disagree. “There’s nothing she’d do to endanger those kids,” Lut! said. He described her as a mother who would have breakfast made when the kids came over, “dressed to a T, games and DVDs ready.” The housekeeper said, “As a mom, I can tell you: Britney was a good mom. She didn’t want to hurt or do anything wrong with her kids. No. I was there, and I know all she wanted was to have her kids at least another night.” Robin Johnson, the court-ordered monitor, who saw Spears four times a week, said, “None of this was her fault.” She went on, “There were so many people involved in her life that caused all of this craziness with her. I don’t have anything derogatory to say about her. . . . It was probably one of the saddest cases that I’ve ever done in my entire life.”

After the 5150, Jamie and Lou Taylor consulted lawyers about establishing a conservatorship for Spears. (Harder, Taylor’s lawyer, said that on the calls Taylor was “more of a listener than a contributor.”) Jamie and Lynne were terri!ed for their daughter, multiple people said; they were worried that Lut! might be siphoning money from Spears, or that he might encourage impulsive choices that would leave her in serious debt. “The piranhas around Britney were fucking awful,” Gallery, the photographer who worked for Spears, said, “and her parents were trying to help.” A conservatorship “seemed like an impossible dream at that point, with Sam still so entrenched in her life,” Lynne wrote, in her memoir, referring to Lut!. Jamie planned to !le papers on January 22nd, but then Taylor “felt God leading them to wait, fast, and pray, despite the frustration of a phalanx of lawyers,” Lynne wrote. “I shuddered to think of what depths of desperation we would have to plumb to regain charge of our child.”

According to Lut!, Spears had passed regular drug tests for much of the prior year, but she had begun taking Adderall when he was away for the holidays. On January 28th, she and Lut! had an argument. Lynne called Jacqueline Butcher, the family friend, asking for a ride to Spears’s residence. Lynne told Butcher that she hoped the falling out with Lut! might provide an opening for her to reëstablish contact with her daughter. Spears had been keeping her family at arm’s length. Jamie, Lynne, and Spears’s brother, Bryan, have all spent years on Spears’s payroll, and, as friends who spoke with her at the time recalled, she was increasingly resentful of their efforts to in#uence her. Butcher, who had become friends with Lynne through the entertainment industry, spent nearly a decade in close proximity to the family before, during, and after the creation of the conservatorship. She remembered how, during a trip to Las Vegas without Spears’s parents or siblings, Spears asked her for comfort. “She has anxiety,” Butcher said. “She called me on that trip and said, ‘Miss Jackie, come to my room.’ She just wanted me to hold her hand. She was in the living room, on a chair, and I just pulled up a chair and held her hand.” Butcher was sympathetic to the idea that Spears needed to be wrested from Lut!’s in#uence, and she agreed to help Lynne. They drove to the house together, in Butcher’s gray Range Rover. But, unbeknownst to Butcher, Jamie was following behind them. Arriving at the house around dusk, they were greeted by Lut!, who said that Spears had left and wouldn’t come back until Jamie was gone. “Jamie was furious,” Butcher said. “He was screaming that he wasn’t going to let Sam do this.” A security guard asked Jamie to leave; after he did, Spears returned home, with Ghalib. She seemed odd and hyper—she was talking in a baby voice, standing up and sitting down, compulsively combing her hair, repeatedly changing her clothes and those of her dog. “That’s when the shit hit the fan,” Butcher said. Lynne, Ghalib, and Lut! exchanged bitter recriminations, accusing one another of being a poor in#uence on Spears. Finally, Spears shouted at them to shut up.

Lynne writes, in her memoir, that Lut! called her two days later to tell her that “somebody was coming to try to commit Britney again.” Lut! maintains that Spears’s doctor called in a second 5150; others close to the situation speculate that Lut! said something to the doctor to trigger the call, an allegation that he denies. Butcher, Lynne, Lut!, and Spears were at the house when the

police banged on the doors and then marched in. “It was a freaking circus—you would think it was a swat team taking down a drug ring,” Butcher said. “Cops, helicopters, !re department—you name it.” Spears, Butcher added, “was coöperative but crying and shaking” as they strapped her to a gurney. At one point, Butcher said, she moved to comfort Spears, and a !rst responder shouted at her to freeze and keep her distance. Spears was loaded into an ambulance, alone, and taken to U.C.L.A. Medical Center, #anked by a police convoy the length of a football !eld. It was after midnight. Butcher, accompanied by Lynne and Ghalib, followed the ambulance to the hospital. At U.C.L.A., staff put them in a waiting room, where, joined by Jamie, they stayed; Spears had not given them permission to come see her. Some time later, they found out that Lut! had arrived and was in the room with Spears. Jamie became irate. “That’s it. We’re getting him out of there. We’re getting the conservatorship,” Butcher recalled him saying. The following afternoon, Butcher joined Lynne at Bryan Spears’s apartment, and, at Lynne’s request, got on the phone with Jamie’s attorney, Geraldine Wyle. Urged on by Lynne, who said her throat hurt and that she was too fatigued to provide details, Butcher spoke with Wyle for about an hour, providing a comprehensive account of the events at Spears’s house in the previous days. Wyle said she would write up a report and submit it to the court. In retrospect, Butcher feels that she was exploited. “I didn’t know how a conservatorship worked,” she said. “It was supposed to be temporary.” From that moment, the proceedings moved with remarkable speed. The next morning, with Spears still at the hospital, Jamie, Lynne, and Butcher went to a small courtroom in downtown Los Angeles. Butcher had been told that she would be required to give more testimony and answer questions. Instead, according to Butcher, Lynne told her, “It’s taken care of.” The judge, Reva Goetz, who has since retired, arrived and announced that the conservatorship had been granted. “The whole process was maybe ten minutes,” Butcher said. “No one testi!ed. No questions were asked.” At the time, she felt relief that she’d helped to protect Spears. Now she is haunted by the event. “A conservatorship was granted without ever talking to her,” she said. “And, whatever they claim about any input she had behind the scenes, how could you have assessed her then? Shouldn’t you wait a week, then interview her? She never had a chance.” (Goetz disputed this account, saying that there were lengthy con!dential discussions addressing Spears’s health, and that it was

incorrect to say that Spears was not meaningfully assessed or given opportunities for input. She added, “I can tell you unequivocally that I did not coördinate anything related to the case with anyone connected to the case before it came in.”)

California requires that conservatees be given !ve days’ notice before a conservatorship takes effect, but this can be bypassed if a judge decides that they could suffer “immediate and substantial harm.” Goetz appointed a probate lawyer named Sam Ingham as Spears’s advocate, and then granted the conservators’ petition to waive the requirement to notify her that any of this was happening. Ingham remains in the role; Spears covers his annual salary of !ve hundred and twenty thousand dollars. (Her own living expenses in 2019 were $438,360.) Jamie became a co-conservator, sharing duties with a lawyer named Andrew Wallet, who was appointed by the court. On the petition to establish the arrangement, Jamie or someone working with him checked a box indicating that Spears had dementia. Jamie also !led a restraining order against Lut! on behalf of his daughter. In her memoir, Lynne claims Lut! told her that he had disabled Spears’s cars, cut the phone lines at her house, and crushed up her medications and given them to her in her food. Butcher said that, although she saw Lut! give Spears what appeared to be prescription medication, she cannot corroborate the other allegations, many of which were later not supported by sworn declarations from multiple people, including Robin Johnson, the court- ordered monitor, and Spears’s assistant. But such allegations became central to the establishment of the conservatorship. The group went from the courtroom to Wyle’s law office. As Jamie spoke with Wyle in a frosted- glass conference room, and Lynne and Butcher sat in a waiting area nearby, Butcher asked Lynne, “Don’t you think you and Jamie should be co-conservators together?” Spears’s relationship with Jamie, who could be domineering and hostile toward his daughter, was strained. Butcher recalled Lynne replying that the conservatorship would last only a few months, and that it would be best for Spears to resent Jamie, rather than her, when it was all over. But, after they joined Jamie in the conference room, Butcher said, Lynne began talking about her hopes for how the conservatorship would be managed, prompting Jamie to shout about his control over his daughter’s life, including

Lynne’s access to her. At one point, Butcher recalled him bellowing, “I am Britney Spears!” It was a refrain she would hear him repeat often during the early years of the conservatorship, she said. Lynne, as Butcher remembered it, grew quiet. Three psychiatrists were asked to provide a necessary declaration con!rming Spears’s lack of mental !tness. The third, James Spar, provided it. (Earlier this year, Spar said of Spears, on a podcast, “I don’t know why she still has a conservatorship.”) As a co-conservator, Jamie reinstated Larry Rudolph as Spears’s music manager and installed Lou Taylor as her business manager, !rst for Spears’s “Circus” tour and subsequently for her entire estate. Several people close to Spears said that she had disdained Taylor and expressed astonishment at Taylor’s appointment to a controlling role in her life. Later, some members of Spears’s team raised doubts about Taylor’s !nancial management during her tours. “I’m not saying it was like a million dollars missing—it’s not that obvious,” one of them said. “Money was wasted in a particular way, and when I asked a question I got shut down, cause nobody wanted to admit fault.” (Harder, Taylor’s attorney, called the allegation “completely false.”)

From the earliest days of the conservatorship, Spears appeared to chafe against her constraints. While hospitalized, she had contacted a lawyer named Adam Streisand. He represented her in a court hearing on February 4th, attesting that Spears had a “strong desire” that Jamie not be a conservator. But the judge, based on a report from Ingham and testimony from Spar, ruled that Spears had no capacity to retain an attorney. Spears spoke with another lawyer, Jon Eardley, who attempted to move the case to federal court. The lawyers for the conservatorship argued that “Britney lacked the capacity to hire Mr. Eardley to !le the Notice of Removal on her behalf, and therefore could not have hired him.” The lawyers noted that Spears did have the right to meet with legal counsel: Sam Ingham, who met with Spears for about !fteen minutes two days after the conservatorship was granted, when he visited her at the U.C.L.A. hospital. Several sources close to the situation felt that Ingham was loyal to the conservatorship and to Jamie, despite nominally representing Spears. Butcher recalled Jamie saying that Ingham reported to him on Spears’s movements and activities. (Ingham did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.)

Eardley !led a declaration asking that Spears be brought to court, insisting that she would “testify truthfully that she did authorize me to take action on her behalf and I did so.” According to Rolling Stone, Spears told Eardley, on a phone call that was tape-recorded, “I basically just want my life back.” Eardley !led another declaration, arguing, among other things, that Spears was being denied due process. “It is obvious that the conservatorship was planned well in advance of its implementation as a tool to in#uence the custody proceedings in the family law court and for other illicit purposes,” he wrote. In another document, he stated that, the last time Spears attempted to call him, her phone was taken away from her, and that the number was disconnected the next day. According to Jonathan Martinis, the senior director for law and policy at a center for disability rights at Syracuse University, one of the most dangerous aspects of guardianships is the way that they prevent people from getting their own legal counsel. “The rights at stake in guardianship are analogous to the rights at stake in criminal cases,” Martinis said. “Britney could have been found holding an axe and a severed head, saying ‘I did it,’ and she still would’ve had the right to an attorney. So, under guardianship, you don’t have the same rights as an axe murderer.” Less than two months after the second 5150, Spears taped a guest appearance on the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.” Publicly, her comeback had already begun—and it had been in the works virtually from the outset. Butcher remembers sitting in Spears’s home office on one of the !rst days after she was released from the hospital. Butcher, Lynne, and Spears were on the #oor, Spears on her knees; Jamie was sitting at a desk. A #at-screen TV was playing nearby. “Jamie said, ‘Baby,’ ” Butcher recalled, “and I thought he was going to say, ‘We love you, but you need help.’ But what he said was ‘You’re fat. Daddy’s gonna get you on a diet and a trainer, and you’re gonna get back in shape.’ ” Butcher felt sick. Jamie pointed at the TV and said, “You see that TV over there? You know what it’s going to say in eight weeks? That’s gonna be you on there, and they’re gonna say, ‘She’s back.’ ”

In the following weeks, Jamie wore Spears down. “He would get all in her face—spittle was #ying—telling her she was a whore and a terrible mother,” Butcher said. Spears was told that

she could see her kids again only if she coöperated. “Lynne was just, like, ‘Obey Daddy and they’ll let you out,’ ” Butcher added. Spears behaved, and regained limited access to her children. But Jamie got rid of anyone his daughter had been close to. The housekeeper who worked for Spears during the custody dispute remembers being let go at this time. “Anyone that works for her from now on goes through me,” Jamie told her. When Spears called the housekeeper a few days later, asking her to come back, the two of them cried on the phone together. “I love you and I miss you, too,” the housekeeper recalled saying, “but your dad told me I’m not allowed to work for you.” After that, she said, Jamie told her not to accept Spears’s calls. Spears went back to the studio, to record her sixth album, “Circus.” Drug tests were mandated in the contracts for the dancers who were hired for her next tour. To provide evidence of her comeback, Spears spent months !lming a documentary called “Britney: For the Record.” It’s a remarkable document, capturing Spears in a strange limbo between assertion and acquiescence. She appears clear and composed, struggling to maintain a sort of thwarted optimism. In behind-the-scenes footage of workdays and rehearsals, she gets visibly tense whenever Jamie is in the room. At one point, she does an impression of her father, adopting a thick Southern accent: “You know, she don’t listen to me. I scream at her and she gets onto me about screamin’ at her, but I can’t do it. You’re just gonna have to talk some fucking sense into her.” She says, wistfully, that her life is too controlled. She laments not being able to go out when it’s a “certain time of night, and wanting to walk down the Grove and feeling the crispy air.” “I never wanted to become one of those prisoner people,” Spears says, at another point in the documentary. “I always wanted to feel free, and get in my car and go and not let people make me feel like I had to stay at my home.” But, she adds, “I think that was always the part of me that kinda got me in trouble. I had let certain people into my life that were just bad people . . . and I really paid the consequences for that, big time. But I just feel like you do something wrong, and you learn from it, you move on. But it’s, like, I’m having to pay for it for a really long time.” Gallery, the photographer, who was her director of content and worked on the documentary, said, “You know how you go for a hike, and get to the top of the mountain, and you have this moment of clarity? Britney was always at the bottom of the mountain, surrounded by security guards, all

this chaos.” But, on occasion, things would quiet down. “We would have these talks, and she would always say, ‘I want to get married again. I want to have a husband. I want to have more kids.’ ” At the time, Gallery said, it didn’t seem as though anyone imagined that the conservatorship would be a long-term arrangement. It was made permanent in October, 2008.

Over the holidays, Spears and Gallery were smoking cigarettes outside a dinner party when Spears gave him a handwritten letter on lined paper, which told her story in the third person, and asked him if he could read it on TV. She had been asking Gallery to help her !nd another lawyer. “She was lied to and set up,” the letter read. “Her children were taken away and she did spin out of control which any mother would in those circumstances.” Spears wrote that she “had no rights,” and that the conservatorship would go on “as long as the people are getting paid.” Gallery told her, “Look, I will read this on TV, but you know I will be removed from your life immediately.” He asked her to sit on it for a couple days. “Then, all of a sudden,” he said, “every lawyer on the team is calling me and demanding I come in and surrender this letter.” He gave the letter to the lawyers, and soon afterward, he said, he was pushed out of her employment. (Gallery read a copy of the letter on TikTok last year.) He recalled contacting one of Spears’s managers a few years later, to see if Spears could give him a recommendation for his application to graduate school. He said that the manager refused, telling him that any such document would serve as proof that Spears was of sound mind. In January, 2009, Christina Lut!, Sam’s younger sister, got word that Spears wanted a phone, and that she would be at the gym of the Peninsula Hotel, in Beverly Hills. “I got a prepaid cell phone and pretended I was a guest,” Christina said. “She and her mom were at the gym, and so I got on a bike next to her. I was dressed to go out that night, so I took my fedora off and hid it. A bodyguard was watching her while she worked out, and then she went to the locker room, and I followed her, and the bodyguard was standing outside. Then I saw her go to the steam room, and I threw a towel over my shoulder and followed her in. She almost screamed—it was steamy, and I’m not sure she was wearing anything, maybe a towel, and this stranger comes in wearing a fedora. But then I said I was Sam’s sister, and gave her the phone in a ziplock, and she thanked me and ran to put it in her locker.”

When Butcher heard from Sam Lut! that Spears had a cell phone and was trying to contact a lawyer, she said, she decided not to alert Spears’s parents. “I didn’t rat her out. I knew the abuse she would suffer,” she said. “I just thought, What’s the harm if she has her own attorney?” But she also said she understood the profound risk that Spears was taking, because Jamie, upon learning that Spears was going behind his back, would “do terrible things, like withhold access to her kids.” Soon afterward, a housekeeper overheard Spears talking on the contraband phone and alerted Jamie, who ordered the housekeeper to con!scate it. “They ended up !nding it,” Christina Lut! said. “Looking back, I’m, like, this is effed up. I’d been to her house. She was super sweet. She was clearly functional enough to work out and put out an album. Why couldn’t she have a phone? I didn’t understand it.” After the phone was found, Butcher said, she was exiled from Spears’s orbit. She believes Jamie discovered evidence of her complicity in the plot. “Anytime someone could threaten the conservatorship,” she said, “they were out.” Jamie !led restraining orders, on Spears’s behalf, against Lut!, Eardley, and Ghalib. In later hearings, Jamie’s lawyers alleged a conspiracy among them to undermine the conservatorship, and claimed that audio of Spears talking to Eardley had been doctored. Eardley’s career unravelled: the state bar of California !led disciplinary charges against him for attempting to represent Spears without having obtained consent to do so. He was subsequently found culpable of misconduct for writing bad checks on his client trust account, and was disbarred.

Eardley could not be reached for comment. “Where is he?” Roger Diamond, a lawyer whom Eardley hired to represent him in his dealings with the Spears family, asked. “Have you talked to him? I haven’t heard from him in years.” Diamond added, of the conservatorship hearings, “I think Jon stumbled onto a real scandal in the probate law of California. It was shocking to me to see the way in which there was room for favoritism on the part of the judge. I had the feeling, in the courtroom, that there was a coverup going on, and it was my job to pierce it, and yet nobody was coöperating.” Lut! and Eardley got in touch with a new lawyer, John Anderson. According to Lut!, who was involved in brokering the meeting, Spears secretly rendezvoused with a contact at the Montage hotel, in Beverly Hills, and signed papers retaining Anderson’s services. On January 27, 2009,

Anderson noti!ed Jamie’s lawyers of his petition to grant Spears the authority to appoint independent counsel. The same day, he spoke to two of Jamie’s lawyers. On January 28th, Anderson sent an e-mail to Lut! and Eardley, writing, “I can say no more; will do no more; and cannot communicate with anyone in this regard any further. That is the end for me.” In early 2009, Jordan Miller, a journalism and media-studies major in Las Vegas who ran a popular Spears fan site called BreatheHeavy, started to publicly lobby against the conservatorship. “It was the reports that she didn’t have access to a cell phone that did it,” Miller, now thirty-three, said. He began signing posts on the Web site “Free Britney”—“followed by lots of exclamation points,” he said. “And I got a lot of pushback for that. People said, ‘You don’t know her situation. Her family is there for her.’ ” A few months later, Miller received a call from a person who patched in Jamie Spears. “He told me he was going to destroy my ass,” Miller said. “He was on the call for probably two or three minutes, and I got no words in edgewise. I was shaking in my childhood bedroom, terri!ed.” After receiving a letter from Jamie’s lawyers saying that BreatheHeavy had violated copyright law, Miller took down the Web site. But he put it up again, a few days later, determined to stick to his conviction that Spears was being mistreated. Around this time, an Elle cover story celebrated the return of “Brit, the one we love—blond, happy, and back on top.” But the paparazzi, who continued to stalk Spears everywhere, were catching her crying in her car and walking around looking detached and distraught. “There were probably just a couple thousand of us who were trying to wrap our heads around it,” Miller said. People in Spears’s orbit also noticed changes. A producer who’d worked with her since she was in her early twenties said that she was “more distant, less present—there were no more jokes, no laughter. By the end, she was just led into the vocal booth. She never came into the room where we were.” Recording with Spears had once been effortless, he said, and now it was “really hard, nearly impossible,” to elicit her spark in the booth. In 2012, she was hired as a judge on the TV show “The X Factor.” Billy B., her makeup artist on set, had !rst worked with her on a fragrance commercial not long before she appeared on the show. He recalled Spears seeming robotic between the commercial’s takes—“head down in the corner, and she’d just come when she was called,” he said. “We were never alone, never unmonitored.” Kim Vo, Spears’s colorist, went out to

dinner with her in 2012 in Las Vegas. The bill was thirteen hundred dollars, and Spears told him that she couldn’t afford to pay her half of it. Yet her “X Factor” role alone paid her !fteen million dollars. In sealed court records recently obtained by the Times, Spears said that she was limited to a two-thousand-dollar weekly allowance, no matter how much she earned.

Many of Spears’s former friends and employees came to accept that she had entered a new, more secluded phase. She had always changed her phone number frequently; now she stopped calling people at all. She’d got engaged to her agent at William Morris Endeavor, Jason Trawick, but they split up in early 2013. “I’ve gone through a few boyfriends with her,” Vo, who stopped doing Spears’s hair around 2012, said. “Every time they get close, they disappear. Every time she gets close to someone who could change her life, decisions are made—‘you’re getting too close.’ ” Spears began performing in Las Vegas; the contract paid three hundred thousand dollars per night, and it required that she remain under the conservatorship. She usually #ew in and out for each performance, to insure that her new gig wouldn’t disrupt her sons’ lives. “It makes me sad,” a former stylist of Spears’s said. “All of us are still friends, but the only one missing is her.” The following year, according to the court documents obtained by the Times, Sam Ingham told Reva Goetz, the judge on the conservatorship case, that Spears was unhappy with her father as a co-conservator and wanted to terminate the arrangement. Ingham also said that Spears was interested in retiring from performing but “believed the conservatorship precluded that.” The Times reported that “those gathered, including the judge and lawyers on both sides, raised the possibility that Ms. Spears’s boyfriend was provoking her discontent.” Her boyfriend at the time was David Lucado, a non-Hollywood type from Atlanta who, after he and Spears broke up, defended her as a “great mother” and spoke out against the conservatorship. His relationship with Spears reportedly ended when Jamie bought a video of Lucado kissing another woman and showed it to his daughter. Sam Lut! claims that Spears sporadically reached out to him. “I’ll go years without contact, and then I’ll get a call every once in a while from her in a closet,” he said. He believes that she has a phone that’s mirrored by her lawyers, and that she calls or texts only when she can get hold of

another phone. “Last time she called me, she was at Ralphs, in Calabasas,” he said. “After she hung up, I got a call from the same number—it’s an Asian doctor, who says, ‘Wow, this is surreal, Britney just borrowed my phone.’ Five years ago, she borrowed a phone at the gym and just made off with it.” Lut! said that the last time he saw Spears was in 2015, and that the encounter left him concerned. “My opinion is that this conservatorship has drastically affected her mind-set,” he said. A friend of Spears said, “They made her a zombie. That is not the same girl.” That year, Spears extended her Las Vegas residency, in a two-year deal worth thirty-!ve million dollars. Jamie had been granted one and a half per cent of the gross revenues from the performances and merchandising. Around 2015, Spears’s Instagram account, which had until then mostly served up bland promotional images captioned with marketing copy, turned into a subject of minor cultural fascination. The posts became weirder and more joyful—low-res sel!es and inspirational quotes, memes about needing chocolate and being single and not wanting to get out of bed. Some images expressed a cryptic yearning: a photo of sunlight !ltering onto a path in a darkened forest, captioned “In!nity,” or a photo of Mars, captioned “Nothing’s what it seems.” In 2016, she posted an image with an unattributed quote: “Are we all so wedded to the ‘spectatorial’ gaze - the con!rming, approving gaze of others- that we don’t feel endorsed in the privacy of our own consciousness?” That same year, the Times reported recently, Spears told a probate-court investigator that she felt the conservatorship had become an “oppressive and controlling tool against her,” and that the system had “too much control. Too, too much!” She said that she was “sick of being taken advantage of.” The investigator’s report called for a “pathway to independence and the eventual termination of the conservatorship.”

Her dad said he found her financial situation in shambles, and because of him she is now in the black.

On Instagram, though, life seemed sunny. Spears started posting photos of her new boyfriend, a twenty-three-year-old actor and model named Sam Asghari, whom she met on the set of one of her music videos. (Asghari did not respond to repeated requests for comment). In 2017, she posted a video of herself painting a canvas on her terrace, captioned “Sometimes you just gotta play!!!!!!,”

followed by what became her Instagram signature: a string of jubilant emojis. The post became the subject of the !rst episode of a podcast hosted by the comedians Tess Barker and Barbara Gray, called “Britney’s Gram.” “We either can never think what she’s thinking, or we know exactly what she’s thinking—that’s the enigma of Britney,” Barker said, delighted. A new Vegas residency, called “Domination,” was announced in 2018. But then Jamie underwent emergency surgery for a ruptured colon, and, in early 2019, Spears cancelled the residency and announced a work hiatus, ostensibly on account of her father’s health. She stopped posting on social media. Andrew Wallet, the co-conservator, resigned, receiving a hundred-thousand-dollar parting payment. The following month, TMZ reported that Spears had checked into a mental- health facility, and “Britney’s Gram” received an anonymous voice mail. “Hi there,” the caller said. “I cannot disclose who I am . . . I used to be a paralegal for an attorney that worked with Britney’s conservatorship. I am no longer with them.” The caller alleged that Spears had been forced into the mental-health facility months earlier, against her will. Spears’s camp suggested that the voice mail came from an impostor, but, after Spears resumed posting, her fans began combing through her social-media posts for clues. A conspiratorial energy developed among her followers after a fan left a comment on Spears’s TikTok account reading “if you need help wear yellow in your next video,” and then Spears posted a video to Instagram wearing what she called “my favorite yellow shirt.” The Instagram account grew bizarre: Spears regularly posted multiple near-identical photos of herself, and also videos of herself dancing alone, passionately, in her house. Fans began reading these either as indications that Spears was unwell or that her team was making her look unwell in order to justify the conservatorship. A member of her team claimed that, aside from “about one per cent” of her posts—those which might incur liability—Spears has “pretty much total control” of her social media. “Would anyone be telling her to put that stuff up?” he said. “It’s detrimental to the brand. Trust me, if I had my way, that’s not what she would be posting. But the point is that she’s not the prisoner with no rights that some people in the Free Britney movement are trying to make her out to be.”

At the hearing this June, Spears described what was happening to her in 2018. She was forced by her managers to go on tour, she said, and was threatened that she’d be sued if she refused. After the tour, she was told to start rehearsing for “Domination,” even though she wanted to take a break. (The member of her team denied the allegation, saying that Spears had enthusiastically signed up for the tour and that her conservators forced her hand only when she attempted to renege after arriving.) One day, she said, she refused to do a certain dance move in rehearsal, and “it was as if I planted a huge bomb somewhere.” Her therapist told her that he’d been informed by her managers that she wasn’t coöperating or taking her medication—“which is so dumb,” Spears added, “because I’ve had the same lady every morning for the past eight years give me my same medication, and I’m nowhere near these stupid people.” Soon afterward, she said, her therapist put her on lithium; the new medication made her feel drunk and scared, she said. Over the holidays, a woman came to perform a “psych test,” and then her father told her that she had failed it and needed to go to rehab. “I cried on the phone for an hour, and he loved every minute of it,” she said. “The control he had over someone as powerful as me—he loved the control to hurt his own daughter. One hundred thousand per cent, he loved it.” At the facility, she said, she had to attend ten hours of meetings a day, seven days a week, for four months, and if she didn’t coöperate she wasn’t allowed to see her kids or her boyfriend. As Spears privately resisted her father’s involvement in the conservatorship, he used her money to !ght back. Recent court documents show that Jamie’s lawyers billed nearly nine hundred thousand dollars for four months of work, from October, 2020, to February, 2021. The bill accounts for hundreds of hours of work by crisis-P.R. specialists who charged between !ve hundred and nine hundred dollars an hour to respond, they claimed, to media requests. Ingham seemed to begin hedging his bets. He requested, in a court !ling, that future hearings be unsealed, and indicated support for the #FreeBritney movement, as it came to be known: “Far from being a conspiracy theory or a ‘joke’ . . . this scrutiny is a reasonable and even predictable result of James’ aggressive use of the sealing procedure over the years to minimize the amount of meaningful information made available to the public.” In November, Ingham told the court that Spears had informed him that she was “afraid of her father” and that she “will not perform again if

her father is in charge of her career.” A !nancial !rm called Bessemer Trust was appointed as a co- conservator. (Following Spears’s June testimony in court, Bessemer requested to resign from that role, citing the pop star’s desire to terminate the arrangement.) Lynne began to oppose Jamie’s involvement, giving a statement saying that his relationship to Spears was “toxic.” Despite all this, in December, 2020, the conservatorship was extended until September, 2021. “Britney knows that her daddy loves her,” one of Jamie’s lawyers said, in an interview with “Good Morning America.” The #FreeBritney movement staged a thirty-day campaign to call attention to Spears’s story. (“This is a radicalized group,” the member of Spears’s team said. “And they don’t care about facts.”) It urged followers to support legislation in California that would strengthen the right to legal representation for conservatees. In June, on the day of the hearing, around a hundred and twenty devoted supporters rallied at the courthouse in Los Angeles. They gathered on the plaza outside to listen to Spears’s statement, which they streamed and broadcasted over a speaker system. When Spears said that she didn’t feel like she owed her team anything, and that they “need to be reminded they actually work for me,” the crowd cheered.

At one point during the hearing, Spears said that the conservatorship had denied her reproductive rights. “I was told right now, in the conservatorship, I’m not able to get married or have a baby,” Spears said. “I have an IUD inside of myself right now, so I don’t get pregnant. I wanted to take the IUD out, so I could start trying to have another baby, but the so- called team won’t let me go to the doctor to take it out, because they don’t want me to have any more children.” It was a startling allegation, but it was not entirely new. In October, 2020, a makeup artist named Maxi, who is close to Asghari, Spears’s boyfriend, said, on a podcast, that Spears’s conservators had the !nal say about who Spears’s friends were, whether or not she could get married, and whether or not she could have a baby. “We’re talking about some ‘Handmaid’s Tale’-type things,” Maxi said. (When contacted for comment, one of Jamie’s representatives declined to answer speci!c questions but characterized his behavior as that of a loving father saving his daughter from possible ruin. The representative, who repeatedly referred to Jamie as “daddy,” objected to the idea that Jamie, as a churchgoer, would have anything to do with an IUD.)

A lack of control over one’s medical decisions is a fundamental feature of many conservatorships— and it had been clear for a long time that Spears’s management played a guiding role in her personal life. In 2008, shortly after the conservatorship was established, Larry Rudolph told Rolling Stone that the next step in Spears’s recovery was a new boyfriend, because “she’s a relationship girl.” Trawick, her !ancé in the early twenty-tens, was not only her agent; he was formally made co-conservator for a time. Butcher said, “You have to understand—even when she was free, when did she pay a bill? Never. When was she able to pick her friends? Never. When was she ever taught to trust anybody? Never. Anytime she’s trusted anyone, the family has smeared their name and told her she was stupid to trust them.” Some of the silence around the conservatorship may have been well-meaning: after so much invasiveness, people wanted to grant Spears her privacy. One person on Spears’s team claimed that she was down to just a few million dollars when the conservatorship was established, and points to Spears’s net worth now—her assets are estimated at more than sixty million dollars—as evidence that it has looked out for her interests. And, when someone struggles with mental illness, family members may have to take strict actions that might not make sense to outsiders. Even the most vocal members of the #FreeBritney movement, in interviews, have often issued disclaimers that no one but Spears can really know the truth of the situation. Spears’s team took full advantage of all this, sealing court hearings and shrouding the conservatorship in secrecy. Butcher, who saw Spears at her most erratic, noted that an argument for her incapacity would be easy to make about anyone in Spears’s circumstances. “If you’re controlling someone’s medications, and the shrinks who assess them, you can absolutely build a case,” she said. “She was angry, breaking things. And people wouldn’t know the context—that it was because they held the kids over her.”

Conservatorships can protect people who are elderly, or who live with profound disabilities or catastrophic mental illness. But there is also a wide range of alternatives to conservatorship that are less strict than what Spears has experienced, such as conditional powers of attorney or formal shared control of !nances. As conservatorship law is written, the court is required to determine that a conservatorship is—and remains—necessary. “In practice,” Zoë Brennan-Krohn, a disability-rights attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “this is absolutely not the

case. What should be happening is that a judge at a reëvaluation hearing would ask, ‘What else have you tried? Why isn’t anything else working?’ And, if the conservator hasn’t shown that they’ve tried less restrictive options, the conservatorship should be suspended. But I’ve never heard of a judge asking that in any situation.” Lisa MacCarley, an estate-and-probate lawyer in Los Angeles who has become something of a “mascot,” as she put it, for the #FreeBritney movement, describes the city’s probate-court system as plagued by cronyism, with judges appointing advocates from a small list of favored lawyers. Ingham, she said, “has made a lot of money bullshitting people.” The Times has reported that Ingham described a ninety-minute meeting with Spears as “at least three times longer” than any session he’d previously had with her. In one hearing, according to the Times, Goetz, the judge, told him that she didn’t recall an order speci!cally preventing Spears from getting married, but that he “may not want to tell her that.” Ingham replied, “Somehow, that did not come up in the conversation.” Less than a week after Spears’s statement in court, Jamie’s lawyers submitted a !ling that pinned Spears’s unhappiness on Jodi Montgomery, who has served as the conservator of Spears’s person since September, 2019, and whom Ingham has petitioned to be permanently appointed. They suggested that, perhaps, Spears did not have enough say in the matter of Montgomery’s appointment. In another !ling, Jamie’s lawyers requested an investigation into the truthfulness of Spears’s statement in court. People on Spears’s team suggest that further hearings will undermine her claims. “God bless her, I felt sorry for her. But at the same time, don’t be telling tall tales,” the member of her team said. “Your problems, what was wrong with you, your shortcomings—don’t keep trying to blame everyone else for it.” The defenders of the conservatorship offer a set of familiar narratives to explain her ire: that Spears is being manipulated by a man—at this moment, according to some, Asghari—with an interest in commandeering her fortune, and that there is a grave medical diagnosis behind the arrangement that the public has no right to know. “It is so fucking irresponsible to say, ‘Let her do whatever she wants to do,’ ” the member of her team said.

Whoever is posting this ENTIRE GODDAMN ARTICLE is a fucking idiot. This article is not behind a content wall for most people. If you are blocked just clear your cookies.

Thanks for ruining this fucking thread. Blocked.

The idea that Spears needs this conservatorship to function is, to some degree, self-reinforcing. In that respect, experts said, her case is common. Martinis, the disability-rights lawyer, said that many guardianships can prove inescapable, which is why they are vulnerable to abuse. In the extreme cases, he said, “the strategy is isolate, medicate, liquidate. You isolate them, medicate them to keep them quiet, liquidate the assets.” If a conservatee functions well under conservatorship, it can be framed as proof of the arrangement’s necessity; if a conservatee struggles under conservatorship, the same conclusion can be drawn. And if a conservatee gets out, and stumbles into crisis or manipulation—a likelihood increased by time spent formally disempowered—this, too, might reinforce the argument for their prior legal restraints. “Our mistakes make us who we are, and teach us who we can be,” Martinis said. “Without bad choices, we can’t be wholly human. And with the best of intentions, we say to people with disabilities: we’ll keep you from ever making a mistake.” He added, “Should Britney get out, just watch. The !rst mistake she makes, !ngers will wag, and people will say this would never have happened if she were under guardianship.” “There’s this concept of the dignity of risk,” Brennan-Krohn, the A.C.L.U. lawyer, said. “Most of us have a very wide range of bad choices we can make that society is O.K. with, but, in a conservatorship, you’re subject to the decision-making rubric of best interest. And it’s possible we’d all be better off if someone was making decisions for us like that, but those are not the values of the society we live in.” In her remarks this June, Spears gestured, brie#y, to the wider world of broken guardianships: “We can sit here all day and say, ‘Oh, conservatorships are here to help people,’ but, Ma’am, there’s a thousand conservatorships that are abusive, as well.” As she said this, the #FreeBritney supporters at the courthouse, their glittery signs laid down on the concrete, let out an impassioned “Yes!” The question of control has surrounded Britney Spears from the start of her career. How much was she being manipulated by the powerful men who stood to pro!t from her image? To what extent was her existence manufactured by the demands of the system around her? A strong sense of self-ownership always emerged from Spears in performance, speci!cally in dance: when she moved, she was sharp, knowing, seemingly absorbing everything thrown at her and surmounting it through sheer will and charisma. And, all along, as her fans have noticed, she has been singing

songs that she didn’t write but which nonetheless seem to speak directly to her situation: my loneliness is killing me; I’m a slave for you; I’m not a girl, not yet a woman; you want a piece of me. As famous and wealthy as Spears has been since she was a teen-ager, she has never been in full control of her life. Many of the most harrowing revelations in her testimony had been visible to anyone who cared to look closely. She told the court that she’d wanted to express them for a long time but had been afraid to do so in public. “I thought people would make fun of me,” she said. “Or laugh at me and say, ‘She’s lying. She’s got everything. She’s Britney Spears.’ ”

Sorry if this looks weird guys, copying and pasting from my phone.

[quote] A friend of Spears said, “They made her a zombie. That is not the same girl.”

This is obviously true. She always had such a bubbly personality and that has been gone for years. She is dead beneath the eyes. What have they done to Our Beloved Britney?

Nice of you to spend 15 minutes posting the article but it’s not like any of the “it’s for her own good” people will read it.

R37, fuck you!

And where is the CA probate guy to defend the sacred institution that approved this in ten minutes with no testament or questions? Or the fact that they had to shop around to three different psychiatrists to find one that would sign off?

How much of this is Ronan Farrow's reporting and how much of it is Jia Tolentino's?

The $2000 limit is ridiculous too. The dad abused the mother and I believe B when she says he gets off on controlling her. We only got a crumb about her Instagram (she sends captions to a company to post for her)..

Next stop will be a lobotomy.

I’m surprised he hasn't done Angelina and Brad’s custody battle yet since he tweeted about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’ll do it after her latest appeal as he doesn’t believe in PA.

[quote]Whoever is posting this ENTIRE GODDAMN ARTICLE is a fucking idiot. This article is not behind a content wall for most people. If you are blocked just clear your cookies.

Also, if people just Google the title of the article, there is a cached file of it, you can open and view it that way.

I read this article earlier today, and it has haunted me all day.

(MARY!)

I have never been a Britney fan, but I feel terrible for her. Either she is trapped in a controlling conservatorship that she does not need, or she is seriously ill, and needs protection, but is being forced to allow people she does not want to be involved with to have control over her life.

Either way, she deserves more rights than she is given, to choose her own lawyer, to have a say in who controls her life and finances.

I don't know what the truth is, and it is possible that the IUD is necessary as her meds could potentially cause catastrophic birth defects. Or, it is just another method to control her. It seems like anyone that gets too close to her, and doesn't toe the line that Jamie wants toed gets cut out of her life.

She must be quite lonely, and unable to trust that anyone tells her the truth, or is truly on her side.

I envy you people who have no experience with drug addicts and mentally ill women. If you think she sounded lucid and rational in her testimony, there's no arguing with you.

Jamie seems to regularly threaten her with the loss of contact with her children in order to make her "behave."

She doesn't need lithium. It's being used to give her brain fog, thus making her easier to control. If Asghari is behind her assertiveness in court the other day, then I'd say he's good for her. She needs to be told that the leeches are supposed to be working FOR her, not actively against her. Jamie is a sadistic bastard who should drop dead. And the sooner the better. I guarantee nobody else will be willing to take the conservatorship on, for the same reason Bessemer just resigned. This whole thing is a sham and has been since day one. I'm very happy for Britney that her abuse is finally being exposed. Her lawyer needs to be disbarred and released from representing her.

R50, if she fails drug and psych evals, yes, she will lose access to her children. That's the court. It's a legitimate threat. She really truly fucked up long before the Conservatorship.

R49 The obvious solution is to take away the rights of all mentally ill women.

R53, or let them kill their kids?

R54 In what universe does Britney want to kill her kids? She loves them and misses them. That's why she was acting out all those years ago. But nobody cared to find out what was really going on with Britney, it was all about the money. Brit's actual mental welfare was an afterthought.

Funny, Stephen Fry also has bipolar disorder but nobody makes him take lithium.

I wonder if she had a severe postpartum depression or other reaction that was only exploited and exacerbated by threatening to cut off access to her children, which appears to still be occurring when she does not “behave.” It’s sad her access to them has been under threat their entire childhood. It’s also eerie since in old interviews she clearly said she’d happily give up her career to be a mom. You wonder if TPTB didn’t see a risk to their income streams.

Great article. Great reporting. How can you not feel bad for Spears? She's probably not very bright to begin with so that makes it all the worse. The dad is a scum bag, no matter how you slice it.

They used to forcibly hospitalize, drug and shock LGBT people. The last people no one cares to defend now are women and minorities someone says are crazy. If you don't speak English well, go back a few squares as well--maybe electroshock and sterilization. For your own good.

It’s not just DL, R14. It’s everywhere. Why is this such a big story? And all the revisionist nonsense about “we need to reflect on how we treated Britney, blah, blah, blah.” It’s so stupid.

Britney Spears emerged on the pop music scene as dead-eyed sex doll in a LITTLE GIRL’S SCHOOL UNIFORM, begging to be “hit” just one more time - whatever that was supposed to mean. She was clearly brain dead and manufactured with NO personality who didn’t let her gross exploitation of underage girls get in the way of her ambition. I thought she was revolting then but EVERYONE else went along with and now you’re all wringing your hands now.

To me, she’s always been a complete irrelevance. Oh, she has to dance a little and mime to recordings? Oh, that sounds terrible. You mean, while she lives a life of total splendour? Wow, that’s SO tough. As if Britney Spears could even hold down a job as a coffee barista for a week.

All this attention is just further exploitation of her. Ronan Farrow doesn’t care about her. He’s just feasting on her bones, of what’s left of her.

Maybe she should’ve put her foot down when they said, “You’re gonna dance around like a stripper in school girl’s uniform and give the camera that look that daddy likes so much with your mouth agape like you’re gonna blow him”? Maybe things would’ve turned out differently. She always said herself, “I’m not that innocent.” Fuck Britney Spears. Her entire career is built on that message.

R59, you said it way better but that is what I meant.

R60, this is a real person underneath all of that. She deserves a life. She’s certainly provided an income to enough people.

[quote]She was clearly brain dead and manufactured with NO personality who didn’t let her gross exploitation of underage girls get in the way of her ambition.

You can't have it both ways. If she's brain dead and being exploited then she's not exactly the one exploiting underage girls, now is she?

[quote]Maybe she should’ve put her foot down when they said, “You’re gonna dance around like a stripper in school girl’s uniform and give the camera that look that daddy likes so much with your mouth agape like you’re gonna blow him”?

You say she's irrelevant but you sure do think a lot about her and how her dad was probably raping her, and blaming her for her own exploitation.

You are incredibly troubled.

I’m sure Rosamund Pike is taking good care of her.

She also sang I’m A Slave 4 U and now claims to be enslaved. Be careful what you wish for.

Wow R62. You come across as really intelligent. I wish you luck with increasing your reading comprehension this year. Reach for the stars!

[quote]You come across as really intelligent.

I'm smart enough to see that you were here 11 hours ago insisting you "didn't give a fuck about Britney Spears," but then returned half a day later to post several times, including writing a long, convoluted rant that practically turned into statutory rape-and-incest slashfic at one point, all while claiming you absolutely do not care about her.

I think you should post several more times about Britney posing with her mouth agape like she's about to blow her own dad, just to show us how much you really do not care.

I was ANXIOUS to hear about Ronan Farrow again

OH wow, Another Frau thread ! Aren't we spoiled ! Shall we call it "gay celebs that are only loved by fraus , exhibit 1 : Ronan farrow" ? Thank you for trying to push him down our throat again, as the model we should aspire to, Lady Frau OP

Her own father called her fat, whore and a bad mother. Wow!

R69, her father said “I Am Britney Spears” in the first meeting after the conservatorship was established. And that’s her conservator!

He sounds a lot more crazy than she will ever be.

The article is based on reports from people who are not close to the situation, including winners like Sam Lufti. We still don't know what is actually going on and probably never will.

I tried to read the New Yorker story and finally gave up. It does seem that BS was screwed by her family but devoting so much time to her story was exhausting. Did Farrow spend more time dealing with the whole topic of conservatorship in the story? It was just too tedious to keep reading it.

No, r72. The problem is that anyone who actually knows anything will not talk to Farrow. It's sad and maybe there were abuses, but Farrow didn't uncover anything. All he did was give a wide platform to the crazy Free Britney types and hangers on who have been-- rightly or wrongly-- removed from her life. And yes, he desperately needed an editor.

Also, R72, there were tons of diereses in the story.

So many so many diereses

coöperate

reëvaluate

etc...

R74, do you mean diæreses?

R71 and R73, that's not true. Farrow investigated the origins of the conservatorship thirteen years ago. He interviewed many people from that time who knew Spears or were directly involved the creation of the conservatorship.

She's right - they should be in jail.

This is going to make a wonderful film some day. It's just so crazy and sad to believe this happened to her.

Gee R66, why don't you listen to The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast w/ Farrow and Tolentino, the latter of which fully acknowledges how problematic Britney Spears has been from the very start of her career for the very reasons I cite above, something you've apparently only been enlightened to today.

It's perfectly fine for someone to question why this is such a big deal in the media - a lot of people are so concerned about Britney Spears' enslavement, not so much of the plight of disenfranchisement that Black Americans still live with everyday. There's nothing wrong with asking, why does this matter? I've even heard her song recently referred to as "Baby, One More Time" in the media. That's not what it's called. Also, I never said she was exploited - she had a choice. I said that in making that choice, she was exploiting young girls everywhere who were then expected to be compliant, unquestioning and ready for abuse of some sort, from their peer group and older. She's not exactly a towering figure for women's rights.

Also, the "you posted here and at this time" thing is so lame. Make an argument, if you have one. The fact is, this story is inescapable. Perhaps this is what we can expect from a media geared toward aging millennials, that people think this matters, gawd help us.

See R77 for the whole point of this.

Notice the article is extremely vague on what's actually wrong with her...and there is something wrong.

The playback of her statement to the court sounds super cray cray. Saying to judge "fucking this, fucking that." Okay. Maybe demonstrating some control might have been more convincing because she still sounds unhinged.

It sounds like the conservatorship prevents her from having an attorney (outside of the attorney who is paid by the conservatorship). If she could get an independent attorney, I think she could get out of this. I have a legal background, but I can't understand 100% why she can't hire an independent attorney. (Sounds like the conservatorship strips her of legally having the mental capacity to consult with an attorney -- yet they have hired some kind of yes-man attorney for her.)

Ronan Farrow is the new Dominick Dunne (Vanity Fair), it seems. I would take this article with a grain of salt. However, it is a nice, broad look at how things came to be.

I do feel sad for her, that she feels "dead" inside. It doesn't make sense that Jamie (Dad) is reportedly making "only" ~ $18,000 per month and lives in a trailer. There have to be more assets being transferred to him.

[quote] not so much of the plight of disenfranchisement that Black Americans still live with everyday

Good christ give it a rest.

I was struck by all those diereses too, R74 (didn’t know what they were called until today.) Comes across as so pretentious and stupid.

[quote] I was struck by all those diereses

The New Yorker has always done that.

R82 She actually did try to hire an attorney at some point with a burner phone. When he showed up to court they ruled she couldn’t have legally hired him because she lacked the mental capacity to make that decision. He then got disciplined by the bar for falsely attempting to represent someone.

R80, see R81: she uses CUSS WORDS.

R59 and R78 will NOT rest until this thread is in meltdown over the injustices THEY SAY are suffered by women, black people and SJW's everywhere! What brave activists they are!! Slay in power kings! *eye rolling as I type*

I totally agree with the poster immediately upthread that her recent testimony in court did more to hurt her than help her. She was lucid and she made sense, so that is a plus in her favor, but the delivery was so off-center that it would totally support the assumption that she is still crazy. Like, is that the best you can do to sound like a normal person who is control of himself? The very best? What is she like at her worst?

That said, I still don’t think it’s enough to strip her of her civil rights. Because that is what is happening here. This woman is basically a slave. It’s grotesque.

Her speech was rushed but lower and slower than her Instagram voice. I think she was nervous and angry and this was the first time she made a public statement about how she felt.

People who aren’t used to testifyIng in court often sound rushed and nervous. She was lucid enough to know she did not want the hearing closed to the public.

[quote]the delivery was so off-center that it would totally support the assumption that she is still crazy. Like, is that the best you can do to sound like a normal person who is control of himself? The very best? What is she like at her worst?

"Sounds crazy" isn't a medical diagnosis, and even if she's legitimately "crazy" as you say, how exactly do you propose she "do her best to sound like a normal person"?

The people saying she sounds crazy are exactly like those weird ladies who say family members "didn't cry right" when being interviewed about their murdered relative.

Maybe she should've lip-synched her testimony so she felt more comfortable...like on the stage.

Xtina you wrote a lovely thread of support to the girl you once knew!

R77, I agree, and the reason this thread is important is that it can happen to ANYONE. Any person can be labeled mentally ill and dangerous to self or others. Those are entirely subjective terms that can be attributed to anyone who has expressed anger, depression, etc. before a witness or in writing. Things can be spun into a web of circumstantial bs that will get you in trouble. Of course, if you are poor you'll be briefly detained, medicated and then kicked out on your drugged-up ass in the middle of the night to fend for yourself. If you have insurance or are rich, they have no reason to ever let you go--you'll be diagnosed, drugged, evaluated and warehoused over and over until the money runs out. Whoever benefits the most from this scenario--the hospitals, obviously, but maybe some family members?--will make it very difficult for you to prove you are not crazy. How exactly does one prove a negative?

I don't know exactly the details of Britney's situation, but the courts/medical establishment want to keep it secret. To protect her privacy? WHAT privacy? No, to protect themselves. They know how bogus this dance is and are terrified for the public to find out the peril citizens are in due to letting the system get this out of hand.

Exactly, this is bringing light to a larger conversation about guardianship. If you saw the movie I Care a Lot or read the article it’s based on, you know.

Just like Britney, they have no representation while their assets are being liquidated. All it takes is a doctor’s signature.

That was a great read, details notwithstanding. I believe much of what was said. The main point I believe is this family (and a whole host of others) latched on to a cash cow tit and want to keep milking it. It sounds like she has a major disorder, and to keep it secret, she's been blackmailed into submission until now.

My guess, HIV. And she's just learned that you don't die from that anymore. Along with a serving of schizophrenia. Also, she's a great performer, but she's just not that bright.

Jamie sounds like a next-level super-power in the villain category.

^^And a baby-raper. Pretty sure he sexually abused her, all signs point to it.

In my jurisdiction, the subject of a prospective guardianship does show up in court at least one time. The judge will look at and talk with the person and then decide whether or not to grant the guardianship.

From the article, it sounds like BS was never even in court before the conservatorship was granted. I'm surprised that a judge saw the name "Britney Spears" and granted the conservatorship without seeing / hearing from BS. I'm not familiar with California courts, but it does seem like a judge would tread carefully in a high-profile case. It does sound fishy that BS did not get celebrity justice (starstruck judge, special treatment in favor of the celebrity).

No matter what her diagnosis, it is unlikely to explain her personality or predict an outcome. Any decent doctor will admit that. Diagnoses are often used to give a name to a person's distress so the insurance will pay for therapy or drugs. Yes, there are very serious mental illnesses, but when you have them you don't work 10 hour days, perform in Vegas for years and make millions of dollars.

Agreed r100

[quote] Meghan Markle's husband is Prince Hot Ginge, and that nude photos exist that provide verificatia

No they don’t.

R100, don’t post rubbish. This isn’t a QAnon Trump fucker web site.

[quote] No matter what her diagnosis, it is unlikely to explain her personality or predict an outcome. Any decent doctor will admit that. Diagnoses are often used to give a name to a person's distress so the insurance will pay for therapy or drugs.

Not true. The second part of your statement, however, is. For a conservatorship she shouldn’t be able to work the way that she has been doing. She’s 40 years old.

[quote] It does sound fishy that BS did not get celebrity justice (starstruck judge, special treatment in favor of the celebrity).

Actually it does. She’s a puppet, a product. Hollywood wants to keep bankrolling thus Hollywood judge signs off.

The "I Care A Lot" movie and its release the past year is obviously good for her and the public to understand some of this bullshit. That film was so god damn infuriating - particularly if you have an older person that you care for.

So many people should be put into jail - or the judges / attorneys should be disbarred or censored.