Britney Spears’s 13 year conservatorship may finally be coming to an end. As we’ve heard, Britney’s manager, co-conservator and court-appointed lawyer have all recently stepped down after her testimony in her case went public. A lot of people were surprised to hear how much Britney’s life has been controlled under the conservatorship. In that initial testimony she also said that her existing lawyer did not inform her she had the right to petition the court to end it. Britney will be able to do that now, because she’s been granted the right to hire her own lawyer. Britney spoke over the phone in an open hearing in court yesterday. She described how she’s been abused by her father and has been scared of him since she was a child. She also said that she would like to press charges against him for conservatorship abuse. CNN did some bullet points that sum up the latest developments in Britney’s case well.
New attorney: Spears has retained former federal prosecutor Mathew Rosengart, who attended the hearing Wednesday. The decision came after Spears told Judge Brenda Penny at a hearing last month that she wanted to hire her own attorney to advocate on her behalf, stating that she had been forced by her conservators to perform, take lithium and remain on birth control against her will.
Calls for justice: An emotional Spears said she would like to bring formal charges against her father Jamie over his role in the conservatorship. “I would like to charge my father with conservatorship abuse,” said Spears, speaking to the court by phone, breaking down in tears at times. “I want to press charges against my father today,” Spears said. “I want an investigation into my dad.”
Heartbreaking testimony: At one point during the hearing, Spears said she felt that those in the conservatorship “were trying to kill me.” “If this is not abuse, I don’t know what is,” the singer added. Spears called her conservatorship “f–king cruelty.” Spears told the court she was not willing to be evaluated to remove her father from the conservatorship, saying she has “serious abandonment issues.”
New attorney speaks: Spears’ new lawyer called on her father Jamie to voluntarily step down as her conservator, saying it was “in the best interest” of his client. “Jamie Spears should be removed as conservator because it is in [the] best interest of the conservatee,” Rosengart, a veteran entertainment litigator now representing the singer, said outside the courthouse today. “We will be moving promptly and aggressively for his removal. The question remains, why is he involved? He should step down voluntarily because that’s what’s in the best interest of the conservatee,” he added.
I wonder if Britney’s dad will just see the writing on the wall and step down as her lawyer is requesting. It’s only going to get worse for him if he continues to use Britney’s money to try to control and abuse her. The world knows what Britney has been going through under her father’s control. Plus, as so many of you have pointed out, how is she only worth $60 million at this point? She has one of the most popular fragrance lines and she had a Vegas residency for four years! Hopefully Britney’s sad case will set an example for others who are using conservatorships as a means of financial control, and hopefully she’ll be free of it soon.
Who knows if Britney wrote this.
We all want to press charges at this point. Sick of her family. I’ve also wondered how much this has to do with the invasiveness of boomer parents. Most of the boomer parents I know are way too into their kids’ lives and super controlling. It seems like a boomer dream to get paid to run your kid’s life.
Sue ‘em Britney.
That must be the Boomers who had kids later in life. The Boomers who became young parents in the 70s (like my parents) were famously hands off. Stranger Things on Netflix (and a zillion 80s movies) accurately capture the totally unsupervised childhoods us 80s kids had.
But I’m 100% team Britney.
Bettyrose, I agree. Im like your parents, had my kids late 70s early 80s. I myself was a teenage mother. I have raised my kids to be free spirits, they have autonomy over their own lives. If they include me in their decision making, if they seek my advice, I’ll gladly be involved and I would feel honored to be included. Otherwise, my kids are each their own person.
As for Britney, I hope to God she sues her father and all his minions to high heavens and back and wins each and every lawsuit.
LOLOLOL, 💯 on that. I was telling my kids that’s what my childhood was like, minus the monsters. And Starcourt – malls used to be lit! And I worked in a damn ice cream store!
This isn’t Boomer parenting. This is a POS using any means necessary to ensure this woman has to live the rest of her life supporting the rest of her family. This isn’t being into her life. He doesn’t give a sh*t about her life. Just her earning potential.
@ Agirlandherdog, thank you!! I am tired of people automatically going to the Boomer cause of problems! All Boomers are not like this!! Yes, I am a boomer, but I am not an evil parent to my kids. This is a case of abuse and control. This has been happening for decades to child actors as well.
I generally think this of anybody who pushes their child into some avenue of Hollywood or an industry. Are there great parents that support performers out there? Yeah of course… but most of it seems to be sleezy greed and desperately trying to find fame through your children.
Bingo. This isn’t generational. Jamie is a greedy stage parent who was enabled by the Courts to control his daughter and rob her blind. Stage parents like Jamie existed long before the Boomers were born.
this is heartbreaking to read. glad she is finally able to speak out, hope more change is coming soon.
Am so pleased to hear that she has a new lawyer and hope that she will be free soon.
Her father, family and management team ALL need to be sued and investigated for financial fraud – she should be worth much much more than $60mil. Much more!
+1
I sincerely hope they deeply investigate every single member of this conservatorship. She should be worth hundreds of millions, if not more.
I would be surprised if even Britany could make charges stick. Not because he behaved ethically, but unfortunately, because he behaved within legal bounds.
That intersection between mental health and law is frightening. Once you acquire a psychiatric label and run afoul of the wrong person, a lot can be done to you ‘for your own good,’ and there are virtually no regulations in place to hold your “minders” to any sort of accountability.
$300,000/NIGHT for her Vegas residency… I hope they’re already retaining the best forensic accountants.
The more I see about this case, the more enraged I become. At this point, I honestly believe she does not have a mental disorder, or at least not when this all began, but rather Post-Partum Depression. Her second child was MONTHS old when she was placed in this conservatorship, and her first one was less than 2. Add that to custody battles, divorce, etc…
Can you imagine being fed medicine that you don’t even need, and being told you are crazy for 13 years? While your family spends YOUR money and gaslight and isolate you constantly?
I cannot believe she wasn’t allowed to have a freaking burger!
By now, I totally believe she will need help because there is no way to come out of 13 years of abuse without some degree of PSTD.
One of the most shocking things we’ve learned just this week is that there was never a mental capacity declaration filed with the court. Like. Never. That is why they have been calling this ‘voluntary’ when it is anything but.
The judge waived literally all of Britney’s civil rights. She wasn’t told she was being put into a conservatorship. She was denied counsel of her choosing. She was placed under complete control of her abusive, alcoholic father. We know of at least one instance of the judge joking with her lawyer that he shouldn’t tell her she was legally allowed to get married. And her lawyer even got official permission from the court to not have to tell her things so she couldn’t object.
I hope everyone involved is this absolute travesty gets sued into oblivion. Including the state of California.
Yes, I couldn’t BELIEVE that when I heard it! This was a ‘voluntary’ conservatorship. Wtf??? The tragedy now is that Britney is so institutionalized that it will be so challenging for her even if she does get out of this conservatorship. She should have been learning how to manage her life as an adult over the last decade, but that was taken from her.
Gabby, you and I are simpatico. I’ve been raging about this for the better part of a decade. And being dismissed. While it’s gratifying to finally see her closing in on justice…
I want to know why that judge didn’t just REMOVE JAMIE SPEARS ON WEDNESDAY.
Judge Penny is supposedly a principled jurist. She has a stellar reputation.
I’m not seeing it. What I’M seeing is someone who’s either just as corrupt as Reva Goetz, utterly incompetent, or who’s spent the past several years (since getting the case after Goetz’s retirement) IGNORING Spears and the facts right under her nose out of laziness or apathy. And now? Now she’s probably in “CYA Mode,” like Ingham and everyone else who can see the train heading down the track right for them…
But nothing, NOTHING explains why this judge wouldn’t simply REMOVE Spears out of hand. Judges have a huge amount of latitude; Judge Penny could’ve done this at any time, and NOW? Why on earth hasn’t she already done it??? I can just hear her claiming it’s about following protocol, blah blah blah…
Enough. ENOUGH. Why is this man STILL a co-conservator for the daughter who’s been SCREAMING for YEARS that she wants nothing to do with him??
Sounds like her new attorney is right on to it. Its just sickening what she’s been through. Wishing you all the good things, Britney.
As a former prosecutor I would expect him to – from what I’ve read about him, he will aggressively fight her corner and currently has his guns aimed at Jamie. Everyone associated with the conservatorship should be very scared that he is involved.
what are the chances of the attorney who should have been her advocate being brought up on ethics violations/disbarred?
Good! I hope she gets a whole new team – lawyers, doctors, money managers, etc, and gets her life back.
Her situation is heartbreaking. They destroyed her. Go Britney!
It is telling that her father’s whole defense to this has been “you can’t trust her, she’s crazy, she doesn’t know what she is saying.” You need only listen to her speak to understand that she is not “crazy” – maybe she is a person with a mental illness, but she speaks coherently, clearly, and with purpose. She has made that point repeatedly. I don’t know how you listen to her speak and come away with the conclusion that she has dementia.
At this point, all the pressure is on her father. Everybody knows he is the problem and all the things he does. Every day he holds on is a day the pressure just builds on him, and his motives become clearer.
ETA: as to the point of money, she should absolutely be worth far more. Her perfume lines ALONE have sold 1.5 BILLION dollars in the last 15 years (I checked). How does your name sell billions of dollars worth of products and you only see 60 million in total? There needs to be a forensic accounting when this is all said and done.
I bet her family and attorneys have bled her dry. They felt so entitled to her money they had to take her rights away to access her money without supervision. Remember her parents main concern, when the conservatorship was implemented, was that Britney was going to blow through her money. HER money, not THEIRS. She’s earned it she can do whatever she wants with her money. I am so enraged.
There is a bit in the Ronan Farrow article where they interview Sam Lufti, who was around Britney right before the conservatorship. And while he is not very trustworthy, he said something I totally believe – that her family was more concerned with her spending than her well-being. He says he told her father at one point “If she wants to walk into a car dealership and drop 100k on a rolls royce, that’s her money and she can do that.” And Jamie went nuts on him, saying she couldn’t just do that. Couldn’t just spend her own money, that she earned. I find that very telling.
Yes, I hope someone follows the money. From what I gather Lou Taylor conspired with Jamie Spears to gain control over Britney’s estate. He got control over his famous daughter, Taylor got access to all the money. That’s what the conservatorship was all about.
I also wonder how complicit Kevin was in all this – if he got the kids and a bunch money in return for not raising a fuss about it all and/or allowing the conservators to blackmail her with access to the kids. Maybe I am overly suspicious but he had to have had some inkling of what was going on.
I’ve said this before, but I think Kevin is a good father but a crappy husband/partner. The way he negotiated the extra child support was very suspicious. Jamie originally rejected Kevin’s request, Kevin asked for an accounting of Britney’s finances, and Jamie suddenly turned around and agreed.
Kevin knew something was up with Jamie and Britney’s finances, and he used it to his advantage.
You can’t be a good father and be complicit and turn a blind eye to your children’s mother being denied a meaningful life and relationship with her children. 13 years they all lost.
A good father would not participate in the abuse of his children’s mother. Kevin kept his mouth shut because it paid for his lifestyle. He probably loves his kids, but he loves money more, since he refused to fight for their mother.
My guess? Kevin Federline was complicit with Jamie Spears in ALL of this. They CONSPIRED to have her thrown into lock-up under the 5150, which allowed Spears to begin the conservatorships bullshit.
I think Jamie Spears has used millions of his daughter’s money to enlist OTHERS in this conspiracy, that they’re ALL complicit in this corrupt scheme to keep her virtually imprisoned as they bled her bank accounts and forced her to work to feed more money into their own.
And that includes Judge Reva Goetz, ALL the lawyers, the shrinks, the “team” – pretty much everyone BUT Jodi Montgomery and the Bessemer Trust. It’s a shame Montgomery is getting the death threats others deserve; Ms. Spears almost certainly didn’t intend to vilify her to that extent, and was merely expressing frustration and her desire to be free even of Montgomery’s comparatively benign control.
Reva Goetz and Jamie Spears are the prime villains in this affair, but Kevin Federline is almost certainly just as guilty as Ingham or any of the others on Ms. Spears’s payroll.
(And yes, I’m calling her Ms. Spears because she DESERVES to be called Ms. Spears. She isn’t a child. News outlets are calling her “Britney,” and that’s an appalling breach of journalistic etiquette.)
+1. Britney really has been through some of the ways abusers try to isolate their victims before and during this conservatorship. It happened when she was young, and all kinds of loud prudes demonized her like their families, faiths, and feminisms depended on it- even to the point of encouraging violence. Then with the conservatorship and her father it’s been just as you said, “don’t listen to her, she’s crazy” to justify what she’s been put through.
I’m happy for her. I hope she wins and gets her life back.
I highly recommend everyone go look at the stories and highlights on houseinhabit on Insta.
https://instagram.com/houseinhabit?utm_medium=copy_link
They were in the courtroom for the hearing.
What they did to Britney is so much worse than what we think. #FreeBritney
Thanks! Immediate follow.
And she’s going on CBS with Gayle King to talk more about what she’s discovered!
You’re right, there is so much more than what she said on the recording that was leaked. My God. The people who did this to her and who are benefitting should all be in jail.
I agree!! They should also have to return the funds that they stole from her, especially that POS attorney that was on a weekly stipend for doing nothing for her and was not acting in her best interest.
I don’t know if you covered that one particular article by Ronan Farrow. But he gave an example of her expenses. She was only allowed to spend just under $500k on herself in 2020 (I think) but she had to pay a single employee over $500k for the year. The conservertorship employs dozens of ppl. That’s how she is only worth $60m
I think that article said she was allowed like $2000/week, and yes, I think her lawyer was getting $500k/year for whatever he claimed to be doing for her.
As a 30-year-old for who Britney was EVERYTHING (I was a preteen and teen when she came onto the scene), I want to cry reading this. I watched the documentary, read Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino’s article, read her entire testimony, have followed every development… this woman has been through enough. She’s been gaslit, traumatized, and trapped. She is, unfortunately, a symbol of how strong the patriarchy continues to be in this country (and how the media and judiciary system are some of its strongest enforcers) and how it crushes women who dare to be powerful and imperfect. Love her. So unbelievably relieved for this news today.
Yep. And uses those women/girls to scare others straight, then pretends fear-based compliance is something magical and great.
Her eyes haven’t looked right for years. I’m onboard with having someone to look out for her, but why should those someones all get filthy rich in the process?
That’s what being heavily medicated for years will do for you.
The whole conservatorship needs to be audited – from her finances to her medical history. If they medicated her to keep her compliant… Lithium is only used in a handful of cases and her father’s attorneys keep avoiding the real question: WHAT IS HER DIAGNOSIS? Because I bet my house there isn’t one.
The rumour is they shopped for doctors until they got one to sign off on dementia. Which she clearly doesn’t have!
houseinhabit on Insta has info/documentation somewhere in her stories/ highlights about the diagnosis.
https://instagram.com/houseinhabit?utm_medium=copy_link
Loolaa – I wouldn’t be surprised. Conservatorships around the world are dodgy because everyone is on the conservartee’s payroll. The more money this person has the worse it gets. It’s like a loop that enables some people to take advantage of someone they deem incapable.
Of course not everyone is like this but it is VERY common.
More than #FreeBritney we should add #JusticeForBritney
I feel like her dad’s going to do something awful, possibly to himself. He’s sold his house and was living in an RV parked at a warehouse of Britney memorabilia a few weeks ago when this started. He seems unstable and violent.
I hope her security keeps him away.
I’d be more afraid of him doing a murder/suicide thing
I could see him being a family annihilator
Boomer parents (born in the ‘40s/‘50s) were famously hands off, it’s the next generation reacting to being latchkey kids who became helicopter parents! I hope Britney can get free and have some PEACE.
Boomers were notoriously “hands-off” parents.
We had plenty of autonomy in the 70’s and 80’s. Dude, we didn’t have curfews, seat belts or helmets. We took off on our bikes in the morning and came home when we got hungry! It was the best!
It was the best of times ‘it was also the worst
I was sexually abused as a kid and I look back and say Where were the parents
My entire parenting philosophy stems from that- my mantra is If Not You then Who
I want to be there to parent my kids and help them
I mean sure it seemed cool to be sneaking out to NYC for dead shows at age 13, 14 but ummmm, omg!!! You better believe I’m raising my kids with much less “space” between us
I’m a 90s child and my parents are boomers too (born in the late 50s) and I did not have the hands-free carefree childhood of the 80s. What you’re describing sounds like my mom’s childhood who grew up in the 60s. So not all boomer parents were hands off. That’s when Stranger Danger became a thing and helicopter parenting was in full force. My parents were definitely involved with me and my sister doing our homework and studying for tests in elementary school but became more hands off as we got older. I was allowed to walk to town and stuff as I got older on my own (this was pre-cell phone, I didn’t get my own until I went off to college), my parents weren’t constantly hovering over me. It was a healthy, natural transition to letting me do things on my own unsupervised. And I think my parents nailed it. There wasn’t too little or too much supervision.
Team Britney.
I hope she gets to live her life on her own terms, happy and healthy for many years.
Wrong spot.
Follow the money they “donated” to fundamentalist charities and churches. For example, Lou Taylor, CEO of Tri Star, needs to be investigated asap. How many millions of dollars of Britney’s money may have been moved through Taylor’s husband’s homophobic, evangelical Calvary Chapel here in Nashville? We know the conservatorship under Lou Taylor shut down Britney’s foundation in 2010 (claiming it was bankrupt) and moved the remaining cash into Mercy Ministries–a Nashville group associated with her husband. How much did Britney keep “donating” to these kinds of entities, without her knowledge? I suspect her father, Jamie Spears, has also partnered with church organizations and bogus charities to avoid paying taxes. The fraudulent use of religious tax exemption is out of control, and I think it’s likely where much of her money went.