Chilling catch-22 of Britney Spears’ conservatorship situation

Britney Spears desperately wants to escape her conservatorship – but one feature of the arrangement may make it impossible.

Harrowing new details have emerged about pop star Britney Spears’ 13-year conservatorship, with new allegations of mistreatment by Spears’ father Jamie and disturbing details about how cut off she has been from the outside world.

The new information comes via a harrowing New Yorker expose titled Britney Spears’s Conservatorship Nightmare, co-authored by journalists Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino.

The in-depth read also looks at the mechanism of the conservatorship, which saw Spears’ father given control of her life and finances in 2008, shortly after her very public breakdown.

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Britney – seen here in 2016 – has been living under the conservatorship since 2008. Picture: AFP

Since then, Britney has not been allowed to drive or vote, has lived on a strict allowance and has had most key decisions about her life taken out of her control. She desperately wants out of the unusual arrangement, slamming her family and declaring those responsible for the conservatorship should “be in jail” during a blistering court address last month.

It looks like she has a battle ahead if she wants to escape the conservatorship, with a judge denying Spears’ lawyer’s earlier motion to remove Jamie as co-conservator one week after the pop star’s testimony.

A disability rights lawyer interviewed by the New Yorker said that such arrangements can often prove “inescapable”. “The strategy is isolate, medicate, liquidate. You isolate them, medicate them to keep them quiet, liquidate the assets,” they said.

Farrow and Tolentino further lay out the catch-22 for those wanting to end conservatorship arrangements.

“If the conservatee functions well under the arrangement, it can be viewed as proof the conservatorship is necessary. If a conservatee struggles under conservatorship, the same conclusion can be drawn.”

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Britney, seen here in May 2007 with son Sean Preston. Picture: INFphoto.com

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They also painted a chilling picture for Britney’s life if she is able to have the conservatorship lifted, pointing out that if she were to “stumble into crisis or manipulation – a likelihood increased by time spent formally disempowered,” this could also be used to argue that her conservatorship had been necessary all along, and even potentially to place her back into the arrangement.

The conservatorship is ostensibly still in place to protect Spears from making mistakes that may harm her life or career like those suffered during her 2007 public breakdown.

But since then, Spears has toured the world, recorded several albums and completed a hugely successful years-long Las Vegas residency. As another lawyer interviewed in the New Yorker article points out, it is a human right to make your own mistakes.

“It’s possible we’d all be better off if someone was making decisions for us like that, but those are not the values of the society we live in,” ACLU lawyer Zoe Brennan-Krohn told the New Yorker.

Britney claimed in court that her father relishes the power and control of the conservatorship arrangement.

This is just one disturbing section of a read about Britney that traces from the earliest days of her conservatorship saga – when her father allegedly called a crisis meeting, not to offer his daughter help, but to tell her she was fat and needed to go on a diet – to the most recent, with Farrow and Tolentino revealing Britney made a secret call to 911 the night before her headline-making speech in court last month.

It comes as Spears’ family members and former collaborators speak out about her situation and the #FreeBritney movement.

Australian rapper Iggy Azalea last week spoke out about her experience working with Spears, making disturbing allegations about behaviour she claims to have witnessed from Britney’s father, calling the situation “abusive”.

And Britney’s younger sister Jamie Lynn publicly defended herself after her sister told the court she wanted to sue her family.

“Now that she’s very clearly spoken and said what she needed to say, I feel like I can follow her lead and say what I need to say,” she explained.

“I think it’s extremely clear that since the day I was born I’ve only loved and adored and supported my sister.

Jamie Lynn insisted that in regards to the conservatorship, she has “nothing to gain or lose either way” and that she’s “only concerned about [Britney’s] happiness”.

Originally published as Chilling catch-22 of Britney Spears’ conservatorship situation