{"id":72245,"date":"2021-07-04T14:15:32","date_gmt":"2021-07-04T18:15:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=72245"},"modified":"2021-07-04T14:15:32","modified_gmt":"2021-07-04T18:15:32","slug":"britney-spears-horror-story-can-happen-to-anyone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=72245","title":{"rendered":"Britney Spears’ Horror Story Can Happen to ANYONE!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Britney Spears\u2019s Conservatorship Nightmare<\/h1>\n

How the pop star\u2019s father and a team of lawyers seized control of her life\u2014and have held on to it for thirteen years.<\/em><\/h3>\n

By Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino
\nThe New Yorker<\/p>\n

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Photograph by Arvida Bystr\u00f6m for The New Yorker; Source photograph from Getty<\/p><\/div>\n

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On June 22nd, Britney Spears\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s team, most of whom have had little or no direct contact with her for years, didn\u2019t 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 financial affairs. Some of the team told reporters that they believed Spears liked the conservatorship arrangement, as long as her father wasn\u2019t involved.<\/p>\n

Running the business of Britney had become routine: every Thursday at noon, about ten people responsible for managing Spears\u2019s legal and business affairs, public relations, and social media met to discuss merchandise deals, song-license requests, and Spears\u2019s posts to Instagram and Twitter. (\u201cThis is how it works without her,\u201d 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. \u201cShe\u2019s not supposed to discuss the conservatorship,\u201d the team member said.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s call.) Members of Spears\u2019s 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\u2019s testimony. Spears, calling into the hearing, objected. \u201cSomebody\u2019s done a good job at exploiting my life,\u201d she said, adding, \u201cI feel like it should be an open-court hearing\u2014they should listen and hear what I have to say.\u201d 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. \u201cThe people who did this to me should not get away,\u201d Spears said. Addressing the judge directly, she added, \u201cMa\u2019am, my dad, and anyone involved in this conservatorship, and my management, who played a huge role in punishing me when I said no\u2014Ma\u2019am, they should be in jail.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the next twenty minutes, Spears described how she had been isolated, medicated, financially 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 \u201cfeel like I was dead,\u201d she said\u2014\u201clike I didn\u2019t matter.\u201d She wanted to share her story publicly, she said, \u201cinstead of it being a hush-hush secret to benefit all of them.\u201d She added, \u201cIt concerns me I\u2019ve been told I\u2019m not allowed to expose the people who did this to me.\u201d At one point, she told the court, \u201cAll I want is to own my money, for this to end, and for my boyfriend to drive me in his fucking car.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spears\u2019s 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\u2019 faces on a monitor. \u201cAs she spoke, I wanted to scream, and gasp, and shout \u2018What the fuck is going on?\u2019\u00a0\u201d he said. \u201cBut the lawyers had no reaction. They just sat there.\u201d<\/p>\n

The conservatorship was instituted by Spears\u2019s family\u2014in 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s creation, said she regrets the testimony that she offered to help secure it. \u201cAt the time, I thought we were helping,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I wasn\u2019t, and I helped a corrupt family seize all this control.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s mother, grew up with Jamie, in the small town of Kentwood, Louisiana. Sixty-six years old, she has a smile like Britney\u2019s 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. \u201cI got mixed feelings about everything,\u201d she said. \u201cI don\u2019t know what to think.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. It\u2019s a lot of pain, a lot of worry.\u201d She added, a little wryly, \u201cI\u2019m good. I\u2019m good at deflecting.\u201d Jamie and Lynne eloped when she was twenty-one, and the marriage was troubled from the start: in divorce papers filed, then withdrawn, in 1980, less than two years before Britney\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cThe Mickey Mouse Club.\u201d 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 d\u00e9but single, \u201c. . . Baby One More Time,\u201d featuring a sixteen-year-old Spears in a Catholic-schoolgirl outfit, exploded across American pop culture like fireworks on the Fourth of July. The pleated skirt and bare midriff were her idea\u2014a fact that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cThrough the Storm<\/a>,\u201d a memoir that Lynne published in 2008, Spears urged her mother to divorce her father, knowing that \u201cyears and years of verbal abuse, abandonment, erratic behavior, and his simply not being there for me had taken their toll,\u201d Lynne writes. She and Jamie divorced in May, 2002, and Spears told\u00a0People<\/em>\u00a0that it was \u201cthe best thing that\u2019s ever happened to my family.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 more and hanging out with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, forming a holy trinity for tabloid culture at its early-two-thousands peak. \u201cThe paparazzi were out of control,\u201d Hilton recalled, of one night with Spears at the Beverly Hills Hotel. \u201cFighting over getting the shot, pushing each other against my car, scratching it with their cameras. It was overwhelming and frightening.\u201d The hairdresser Kim Vo, Spears\u2019s 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 fist.<\/p>\n

Spears distracted herself with work\u2014a relentless grind of dance rehearsals, studio sessions, photo shoots, stadium performances, long nights on the tour bus, and hotel check-ins before dawn. \u201cThe schedule was crazier and crazier,\u201d Julianne Kaye, a makeup artist who worked with Spears in the early years, said. \u201cShe would have little breakdowns. She was always crying, saying, \u2018I want to be\u00a0normal<\/em>.\u2019\u00a0\u201d 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 filled entire hotel floors.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cLynne lost her mind,\u201d Butcher, the family friend, recalled. \u201cThey weren\u2019t gonna allow the wedding to be made legal.\u201d The marriage contract wasn\u2019t signed until the month after the ceremony, when Federline legally agreed to limit his stake in Spears\u2019s 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 flip-flops. Spears wanted a family. \u201cI\u2019ve had a career since I was 16, have traveled around the world & back and even kissed Madonna!\u201d she wrote on her Web site, two months after getting married. \u201cThe only thing I haven\u2019t done so far is experience the closest thing to God and that\u2019s having a baby. I can\u2019t wait!\u201d<\/p>\n

Spears\u2019s first son, Sean Preston, was born ten months after the wedding. \u201cOur life was running at 150,000 miles an hour,\u201d Federline later told\u00a0Us Weekly.<\/em>\u00a0\u201cI\u2019d walk into a club and get a table worth $15,000 a night with unlimited free drinking.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. But everything got so crazy.\u201d 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 flashbulbs 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\u2014and besides, she added, she had grown up riding on her dad\u2019s 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 caf\u00e9, cradled her baby, and cried.<\/p>\n

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 filed for divorce in November, reportedly notifying Federline by text message. At a night club, he scrawled on a bathroom wall \u201cToday I\u2019m a free man\u2014f**k a wife, give me my kids bitch!\u201d 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. \u201cI did not know what to do with myself,\u201d 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. (\u201cmommy\u2019s crying<\/em>,\u201d\u00a0Us Weekly<\/em>\u00a0blared, over a full-page photo of Preston.) In February, 2007, she shaved off her hair, at a salon in Tarzana; five days later, she attacked a paparazzo\u2019s car with an umbrella. The two incidents cemented her image as \u201ccrazy.\u201d Both were precipitated by her driving to Federline\u2019s house, trailed by photographers, and being refused access to her kids.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s \u201chabitual, frequent uses of controlled substances and alcohol,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Around this time, Spears met Sam Lutfi, 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 Lutfi. Now forty-six, Lutfi cuts a nondescript figure: 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\u2019t have to work nearly as hard as she was. \u201cShe\u2019d always believed there were massive consequences if she didn\u2019t work, that she\u2019d lose so much, and it blew her mind that she could just call the shots,\u201d he said. \u201cYou want to cancel that meeting? Cancel it. You\u2019re gonna lose five grand? Lose it. She\u2019d walk into a car dealership, say she wanted something. I\u2019d say, \u2018Buy it.\u2019 Her parents would say, \u2018Why would you let her do that?\u2019 But it\u2019s an eighty-thousand-dollar car, not a yacht, and she just got fifteen million from Est\u00e9e Lauder. Anyway, she\u2019s an adult. I\u2019m not gonna tell her that she can\u2019t buy a fucking yacht.\u201d (Lutfi later assumed a similar role in the life of Courtney Love, who called him a \u201cstreet hustler,\u201d and he said that he advised Amanda Bynes\u2019s family as they placed her in a conservatorship. He is currently subject to a five-year restraining order filed against him, in 2019, by a conservatorship lawyer, on Spears\u2019s behalf.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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