But the family was divided by money and fame, and Spears, in an underregulated part of the legal system, was stripped of her rights. ![]() The conservatorship was instituted by Spears’s family-in part out of real concerns about her mental health, people close to the family said. 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 benefit 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.” She assigned harsh blame to the California legal system, which she said let it all happen. 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.”įor the next twenty minutes, Spears described how she had been isolated, medicated, financially exploited, and emotionally abused. “The people who did this to me should not get away,” Spears said. “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 first 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. Spears, calling into the hearing, objected. 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. ![]() They were worried about what Spears might say the next day, and they discussed how to prepare in the event that she went rogue. ![]() (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. 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. Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino discuss the singer’s conservatorship on The New Yorker Radio Hour. Some of the team told reporters that they believed Spears liked the conservatorship arrangement, as long as her father wasn’t involved. 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 financial affairs. 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. In April, Spears had requested a hearing, in open court, to discuss the terms of the arrangement. Yet her conservators, who include her father, Jamie Spears, have controlled her spending, communications, and personal decisions. ![]() 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. Called a guardianship in most states, the arrangement is intended for people who cannot take care of themselves. 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. On June 22nd, Britney Spears’s management team started getting nervous.
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