By Emma Watkins ’23
Staff Writer & Copy Editor
On June 23, the long-reigning “Princess of Pop,” Britney Spears, appeared remotely in front of a Los Angeles court and asked them to end her 13-year conservatorship.
Photo of pop sensation, Britney Spears, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
According to the official website of the Judicial Branch of California, “A conservatorship is a court case where a judge appoints a responsible person or organization (called the ‘conservator’) to care for another adult (called the ‘conservatee’) who cannot care for himself or herself or manage his or her own finances.” In this case, the conservators are Spears’ father and her attorney.
Having suffered under this conservatorship for over a decade, Spears has spoken out previously, but her experiences with courts have not been positive.
“I will be honest with you, I haven’t been back to court in a long time because I don’t think I was heard on any level when I came to court the last time,” Spears began.
She explained that, under the conservatorship, her management has run her into the ground with rehearsals, performances and tours, and she always had to accept their requests.
“I was really, really hard on myself and it was too much,” Spears said in regard to the demands she put on herself during constant touring. “I take everything I do very seriously. There’s tons of video with me at rehearsals. I wasn’t good. I was great,” Spears stated.
In what Spears assumes to be retaliation against her for attempting to say no to their extreme demands during her Vegas shows in 2018, her management team changed her medication to a lithium dosage Spears explained can make one “mentally impaired if you take too much, if you stay on it longer than five months.”
Spears then described feeling constantly drunk on this new medication, explaining she could not even hold a conversation and required constant monitoring by a team of nurses.
Recalling a phone conversation with her father regarding her medication and supposed treatment at a “small rehab program that [Spears’ family and management would] … make up,” Spears stated that her father — one of the conservators who benefits financially from this legal designation — relished in her emotional anguish.
“He loved the control to hurt his own daughter, 100,000 percent,” she said. “He loved it.”
Spears compared her experience in the “rehab program” in Beverly Hills to sex trafficking, due to living against her will with the people she worked with and lacking privacy and control over her own body. If she failed to comply with her management’s schedule for her, she would not be permitted to see her children or her boyfriend, model and personal trainer Sam Asghari.
Addressing possible skeptics who may not believe her shocking details of past and ongoing mistreatment by her family and management team, Spears said, “I’m not lying. I just want my life back. And it’s been 13 years and it’s enough.”
One of the hearing’s revelations most shocking to the public was the news of her forced IUD. “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,” Spears explained. Under the conservatorship, she is prohibited from getting married or having more children.
At the end of the call, Spears expressed she wished she could stay on the phone call forever, for fear of being “ganged up on and … bullied.” She continued, “I deserve to have the same rights as anybody does by having a child, a family, any of those things. And more so.”