Britney Spears requested an end to the conservatorship that has dictated her day-to-day life and estimated $60 million estate for 13 years.
The court-ordered arrangement, which has been under the control of her father and others since Spears underwent a mental health crisis in 2008, has done “way more harm than good,” the 39-year-old pop star said remotely via telephone during a Los Angeles hearing on Wednesday.
ATTORNEY TO BRITNEY SPEARS’S FATHER SAYS HE WOULD LOVE ‘TO SEE BRITNEY NOT NEED A CONSERVATORSHIP’
“This is the only chance for me to talk to you for a while,” Spears said to the judge, according to a transcript from Variety. “I need your help. So, if you can just kind of let me know where your head is, I don’t really honestly know what to say, but my requests are just to end the conservatorship without being evaluated.”
— Free Britney (@FreeBritneyNow1) June 23, 2021
She added, “I don’t want to be evaluated and be sat in a room with people for hours a day like they did [to] me before, and they made it even worse for me after that happened.”
“I’m not here to be anyone’s slave,” Spears said, adding later: “I’ve lied and told the whole world I’m OK, and I’m happy. It’s a lie. I thought that maybe if I said it enough, I would maybe become happy because I’ve been in denial. I’ve been in shock.”
Conservatorships are generally viewed as a protection measure for those who are severely mentally incapacitated.
James Spears, Britney Spears’s father, has served as conservator of his daughter’s estate since 2008. Britney Spear’s caregiver, Jodi Montgomery, temporarily took charge of the singer’s personal affairs in 2019, with the elder Spears stepping back, citing health issues.
Britney Spears later requested the change be made permanent.
Bessemer Trust Co. was established as co-conservator of Britney Spear’s finances last year, and a judge rejected James Spears’s objections in February. In March, James Spears’s attorney, Vivian Lee Thoreen, said her client would “love nothing more than to see Britney not need a conservatorship.”
“Whether or not there is an end to the conservatorship really depends on Britney,” she added. “If she wants to end her conservatorship, she can file a petition to end it.”
Attorneys for James Spears have said in court filings his “sole motivation has been his unconditional love for his daughter and a fierce desire to protect her from those trying to take advantage of her.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to a representative for James Spears to seek comment on Britney Spears’s speech to the court but did not immediately hear back. Britney Spears’s lawyer was also contacted for comment.
On Wednesday, Spears said a lot has happened in the two years since she last addressed the judge.
“The last time I was in court, 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,” she said.
Spears said she felt she had been forced to go on tour in 2018. When she later publicly announced a hiatus, she was forced to take the drug Lithium. Lithium is a prescription medication used to treat bipolar disorder and depression.
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“Three days later, after I said no to Vegas, my therapist sat me down in a room and said he had a million phone calls about how I was not cooperating in rehearsals, and I haven’t been taking my medication,” she said. “All this was false — he immediately, the next day, put me on Lithium out of nowhere. He took me off my normal meds I’ve been on for five years. And Lithium is a very, very strong and completely different medication compared to what I was used to. You can go mentally impaired if you take too much, if you stay on it longer than five months. But he put me on that, and I felt drunk.”
She also said the conservatorship forced her to use an intrauterine device to prevent her from getting pregnant.
“I have [an] IUD inside of myself right now, so I don’t get pregnant,” she said. “I wanted to take the IUD out so I could start trying to have another baby. But this so-called team won’t let me go to the doctor to take it out because they don’t want me to have any more children.”
“I’d like for my boyfriend to be able to drive me in his car,” she said. “And I want to meet with a therapist once a week, not twice a week. And I want him to come to my home. I would like to progressively move forward, and I want to have the real deal. I want to be able to get married and have a baby.”
Britney Spears already has two teenage children with her ex-husband Kevin Federline.
