You know things have reached a new crescendo of injustice when Ronan Farrow decides to report on the matter. Which is precisely what he just did in an article co-written with Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker called “Britney Spears’ Conservatorship Nightmare.” The sub-header, “How the pop star’s father and a team of lawyers seized control of her life—and have held on to it for thirteen years,” gives us some forewarning of just how much insight is about to be shed on one of the most mysterious scandals in Hollywood history. Which is really saying something considering this is the twenty-first century, and sustaining mystery is all but impossible.
As time has gone on, Britney’s treatment by the media and those once closest to her (including Justin Timberlake and, as the article reveals, her ex-husband, Kevin Federline) has been increasingly looked back at with a cringing air. But when we see it, and truly examine who we were—and are—as a society, we can also see how easy it was to quickly brand her as “crazy” (as opposed to a woman pushed to the brink as a result of being treated like a caged animal by paparazzi) and for her father, Jamie Spears, to obtain a “quickie conservatorship” like a marriage in Vegas. Where, yes, Britney herself famously got a quickie marriage followed by an even more head-spinningly fast divorce (or annulment, if you will).
Many of the revelations in the article are not new (just as they weren’t in Framing Britney Spears), and were already referred to in Vanessa Grioriadis’ damning 2008 Rolling Stone piece, “The Tragedy of Britney Spears.” Still, Farrow and Tolentino remind us of Spears’ mounting drug issues at the time, casually slipping in the sentence, “Spears blew off steam by partying: she smoked weed, used cocaine, took Molly with her dancers and jumped into the Mediterranean Sea,” like it’s not rife for appearing in a Jackie Collins novel. Nonetheless, what male musician didn’t do the same? Whether in a rock band of The Doors’ era or a contemporary of Spears’ from the boy band camp? “Blowing off steam,” however, seemed to be a sole right of “the boys.” And that accursed platitude about how they will be boys. Britney, on the other hand, was forced to be a “lady.” Which was presented as a salacious dichotomy thanks to her oversexed presentation. And besides, the whole game was for America to watch her get “deflowered” as she fell increasingly from the virginal pedestal she started out with.
“Handled” into oblivion, Spears was so overmanaged that, according to Farrow and Tolentino’s article, “Paris Hilton had to show her how to use Google…” This was circa 2005. Her family’s constant hovering and telling her how to spend her money—and not too much of it (partly a symptom of coming from poverty)—would serve as a precursor to the conservatorship smackdown. It was upon meeting Sam Lutfi, her “manager”—though more of friend/life coach—that Spears would start to learn her life could be lived in a far more “lid off” manner. As he told his interviewers in the spring, “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… You want to cancel that meeting? Cancel it. You’re gonna lose five 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 fifteen million from Estée Lauder. Anyway, she’s an adult. I’m not gonna tell her that she can’t buy a fucking yacht.” He would tell her many other things, though. Inserting himself into her life like another one of the many Svengalis who already had. But, at the same time, Spears is equally as noted for her “independent woman” stylings, indicated, if nothing else, by the way she expresses herself when she dances. Hence, just another way in which she’s one of the ultimate contradictions in pop culture. As well as one of the most dissected ones.
As Lutfi’s influence mounted, her family grew warier. For they themselves were losing touch with, therefore any control over, their prized cash cow. They told Spears Lutfi was a leech, not to be trusted. It takes one to know one, after all. And as the article slowly builds up these events that would all collide to lead to the conservatorship, in the background also looms Lou Taylor, a business manager/evangelical pastor who had become friends with Jamie Spears and started to bandy the idea of a conservatorship, as he also had to Lindsay Lohan’s equally as repugnant father (again, “there but for the grace of God go I” is a statement at play for any of the other “hot mess” women of the 00s that might have been stuck with a conservatorship like it was a witch hunt). Taylor is also a key person of interest to the #FreeBritney movement, with many suggesting that his role in the shackling of Spears should be investigated.
One thing that “The Nightmare of Britney Spears’ Conservatorship” drives home more than any dissection of her current lack of freedom is the fact that Spears was simply a mother who wanted to be just that: a mother to her children. This is where the “J’accuse K-Fed” element comes into play in a manner that it never really has before, placing blame on his shoulders for preventing Spears from gaining equal access to her children and, in fact, encouraging the lopsided custody agreement that ensued. Per the article, “Federline insisted that, if Spears wanted to spend more time with her children, she needed to go to rehab [as if Federline didn’t know how to party]. 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’ ‘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…”
This harrowing ruling, combined with Spears’ lack of sleep and the constant stalking of the media was a recipe for an explosive cocktail, one that finally blew up in January of 2008, when Spears, at her wit’s end and just wanting more time with her children, took the younger Jayden into the bathroom to hold him for another while longer. She was merely a mother who wanted to be with her kids. There was nothing “insane” about that. Indeed, some might call it the most natural thing in the world. Not to the patriarchal forces at hand that wanted to wield Britney for their benefit. And in order to do that, control needed to be stripped. It was almost miraculous how easy it was to do once they got Britney on that violation of the custody agreement. Farrow and Tolentino describe, per a statement from Lutfi, “…Federline’s lawyer called the police and the fire department, which in turn called an ambulance. News crews gathered outside the house, with anchors reporting live on the standoff. Four helicopters circled overhead.” It took one call from Federline to invoke all of this, and it was immediately after that he was granted sole custody.
All of this also corroborates Spears’ yearning June 23rd statement about wanting another child, but being blocked from having one due to not being “allowed” to remove her IUD. If she could, maybe this go-around at motherhood would actually permit her to spend consistent time with the child instead of having it plucked from her for being “too crazy.” Thanks to that 5150 psych hold that opened the floodgate for everything that followed, namely the conservatorship that was so readily granted while Spears was still lying in a hospital bed, totally unaware just yet of how far the depths of betrayal could go. And while the family can swear up and down that it was all to wrest their daughter back from the influence of the nefarious Lutfi, Jamie Spears himself knew what power would come with acting as his daughter’s “decider.” One of many eerie and unsettling details of the article illuminates how Jamie would frequently scream, “I am Britney Spears!” whenever a decision was questioned. Because, yes, for all intents and purposes he is. And this, too, smacks of some kind of reverse patriarchal version of Psycho, a film that has become something of a talisman in Britney’s life.
After the fury of oppression that followed, and Spears began to realize just how much control of her life had been ceded (control she was willing to let go of due to the constant looming threat from Jamie about limited access to her own kids), she tried multiple times—in manners befitting a John Le Carré novel—to obtain her own legal counsel. This would soon result in the swift changing of numbers and the cutting out of contacts. And there goes thirteen years down the toilet of trying to make a connection with someone—anyone—who could help. In many regards, the pandemic has been a godsend for Britney, as more people with “time on their hands” to examine the most seemingly “middling” details of Instagram account (also addressed in the article) have found overt cries for help in her barely coded messages.
And yet, there is still so much left to decode regarding the mystery of Britney Spears and how she came to be the most oppressed pop star in musical history. Maybe only after she is free can we know the full extent of the horrors she has seen.
