In the State of California, the minimum legal age to purchase alcohol is 21. To drive a car it’s 16 years old; it’s 14 to hold a job. The state happens to be one of only ten in the US where there is no minimum age requirement to be married, an anachronism leading to California having the country’s sixth highest marriage rate among minors. Britney Spears – California resident, multi-millionaire, and 38-year-old working woman – is not free to do any of these things.
Since her highly publicised breakdown twelve years ago, Spears has been placed under a conservatorship which denies her autonomy over her financial, medical, and marital decisions - a legal position even her brother admits she has “always wanted to get out of”. When an L.A. Times investigative reporter asked several law experts who a typical conservatee in such an arrangement might be, they replied that a probate conservatorship like this one is designed to protect the old, infirm, and mentally disabled. So why is a global pop megastar who since the conservatorship began has recorded four studio albums, embarked on as many world tours, and performed almost 250 concerts during a Las Vegas residency still unable to buy herself a coffee without it being monitored?
This is the question the Free Britney campaign is asking. Their hashtag (#FreeBritney) has flared up in recent weeks after a judge denied a motion to install as the singer’s permanent conservator Jodi Montgomery, a licensed third-party professional who took over from Britney’s father Jamie after he temporarily stepped down last September for health reasons. In spite of the motion making it clear she “strongly opposed to having [Jamie] return as the conservator of her person”, Judge Brenda Penny instead reinstated Britney’s father until February 2021. But calls to Free Britney aren’t new; the hashtag has been circulating since April 2019. To understand why Spears might prefer to have a stranger over her father as a legal guardian, why some fans believe she is being exploited, and the significance of April 2019, we’ll need to turn back the clock a little…
…to January 2008. Even the most diehard Britney fan would have to admit that she wasn’t in the best place. Her aunt, described as a “second mother”, had succumbed to cancer a year earlier, and mounting media scrutiny on her relationships, parenting, and haircut ended with Spears in and out of rehab over the following months. Things turned from bad to worse in October 2007 when she lost custody of her sons to her ex-husband Kevin Federline, and at the start of the new year whilst under the influence of an unknown substance, Spears refused to return the boys to their father in a three-hour standoff resolved by police intervention.
Rushed to hospital, she was subsequently interred into Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center’s psychiatric ward; in the interim her father was made her temporary conservator, together with an attorney called Andrew Wallet (we’ll get to him later). Whatever accusations the Free Britney movement might currently throw at Jamie Spears, judging by his daughter’s erratic and alarming behaviour, you’d be hard pressed to deny that the conservatorship was put in place with anything but the best intentions, at least in its original state. The road to hell, as the saying goes. Undeniable too was Spears’ turnaround. Just a month later, she guest starred in an episode of How I Met Your Mother; in July she regained the visitation rights she lost in January to see her children. At the close of the year, Spears released her sixth album Circus to commercial success and supported the record with a worldwide tour. Trips to rehab became a thing of the past.
Yet despite these obvious improvements, her legal position remains unchanged. The Washing Post reported that after the tour she made efforts to remove the conservatorship, but her lawyer was ejected from court on the grounds that she could not hire representatives under its current terms. She wouldn’t attempt to make changes to these terms again until August this year - a whole eleven years later. ‘But surely her stable condition is proof the conservatorship has been working?’, you might ask. ‘If Britney Spears has been doing so well over the last decade, why the outcry?’. True as that may be, for many fans her stability stands as evidence that the limitations on her personal freedom are completely inappropriate for someone who can clearly lead a fully-functional life.
In an interview with the New York Post last month, Jamie Spears labelled the Free Britney campaign a bunch of “conspiracy theorists”, and without giving Mr. Spears too much credence, the movement has admittedly been known to don the odd tin foil hat. An avid Instagram user, Britney’s feed is fanatically poured over, with each new post revealed as a cryptic cry for help only cottoned on by the most attentive of her followers. Examples of these covert transmissions range from wearing yellow to signal danger, deliberately leaving the cover of Laurie Halse Anderson’s book Shout in frame (above), and recounting her enjoyment of Tim Burton’s Big Eyes, a film in which a female artist overshadowed by money-obsessed men “reclaims her art”. When it comes to Spears naming Frozen as her favourite Disney movie however (not Beauty and the Beast, the tale of a young woman forcibly imprisoned by a heartless monster), the desktop detectives are pretty quiet. Most infamous of all was a theory that gained traction in April 2019. After Spears cancelled her second Las Vegas residency in January of that year, the podcast Britney’s Gram played a voicemail from an anonymous caller who claimed to be a former paralegal attached to the conservatorship. The caller contradicted the official statement as to why the residency had been cancelled (Britney’s father had fallen gravely ill in the months prior and the singer wanted to turn her “full focus and energy on [her] family”) by instead suggesting that Mr. Spears had forcibly prevented Britney from performing as punishment for refusing to take medication prescribed by his doctor. Despite its popularity at the time (and it giving rise to the #FreeBritney hashtag), the call is now widely considered a hoax, not least since it seems doubtful that Jamie Spears would abuse his position by terminating a six figure source of revenue. Britney even released a video reassuring fans of her safety (some of whom had camped outside her California home with placards).
A nightmarish vision of Jamie Spears force-feeding his daughter pills to keep her in tow is the knd of fiction best reserved for crackpot online forums. But when it comes to the Free Britney movement, there is one conspiracy cliché that rings true: follow the money. In court documents made available last summer in connection to her conservatorship case, Spears’ biggest expense in 2018 by some distance was her legal and conservator fees, totalling over $1.1 million of her $60 million fortune. As compensation for his role, Jamie Spears claimed $128,000, the same as the previous year despite spending the final two months bedridden with a ruptured colon.
It’s here that things begin to look murky. Whatever way you want to slice it, being in control of Britney Spears’ estate is a great way to make a quick buck. But even that amount was not enough for Jamie’s co-conservator Andrew Wallet, who in October of that same year asked for his fees to be raised to an eye-watering $35,000 a month. For that kind of price you’d probably expect to be paying for someone at the top of their profession. But as this highly informative Twitter thread points out (below), Wallet – who graduated in law from the now-defunct and discredited Northrop University – had no prior experience as a conservator before being appointed to Spears’ case by Judge Reva Goetz, with whom he and Jamie’s lawyer Geraldine Wyle have been paid to give speeches on the merit of conservatorships. Details like these have not stopped his involvement with the Spears estate being plastered all over his personal website.
Now it appears as though the Free Britney campaign has been vindicated. In a statement released yesterday, Spears’ lawyer wrote that his client “welcomes and appreciates the informed support of her many fans”. “Far from being a conspiracy theory or a ‘joke’”, her representative Sam Ingham III said, “in large part this scrutiny is a reasonable and even predictable result of [Jamie’s] aggressive use of the sealing procedure over the years to minimise the amount of meaningful information made available to the public”. Jamie’s own lawyer has tried to justify the lack of transparency as acting in his daughter’s best interests. Yet at the same time as Spears filed to remove her father from the conservatorship, Jamie forwarded a motion to reinstate his friend Andrew Wallet as conservator, despite Wallet mysteriously resigning in March 2019 warning of “substantial detriment, irreparable harm and immediate danger to the conservatee” should he stay on. Spears is by no means the frightened caged bird some fans would have you believe. But if her patience, determination, and resilience over the last ten years has taught us anything, the person we should be believing is Britney.
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This article was originally published online by Ruthless Magazine at this address.
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