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Britney Spears: The $56 Million Hopeless Case

Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman

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Britney Spears (Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty)

Guardianship petitions don’t usually draw crowds of scantily attired teenagers waving signs and chanting slogans. But they don’t generally involve 37-year-old women who earn $500,000 per night lip-syncing at the Park MGM in Las Vegas either. And yet there they all were, Britney Spears’ estranged parents facing each other in a sealed courtroom, while dozens of superfans lining the sidewalk outside the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in Los Angeles and #FreeBritney climbed the day’s trending hashtags on Twitter.

Since her very public meltdown in 2008, Britney Spears has been under a broad conservatorship. After the singer was twice placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold that year, the court granted her father Jamie Spears authority over all her personal decisions, including where to live, conditions of her employment, and whether she would be allowed to drive.

California’s conservatorship statute is somewhat unique, but roughly speaking Jamie Spears functioned as guardian of her person, while attorney Andrew Wallet was guardian of the entertainer’s property, appointed by the court to manage her complex finances. Widely credited with engineering Spears’ comeback, Wallet saw his annual compensation bumped to $426,000 in November for overseeing the singer’s multiple businesses, including a clothing line, her stint as a judge on The X Factor, and her own signature fragrance.

The LA Times reports that Wallet justified his fees by claiming to have increased Spears’ net worth by $20 million and bringing “stability and leadership” to her finances. He also took credit for having “kept ‘the many hundreds’ of people working with her from giving her drugs, thereby preventing financial ruin.” Which might well be true, although it also had the effect of making her every credit card swipe at TJMaxx and Old Navy a matter of public record.

But nothing lasts forever. In late 2018, Jamie Spears suffered a debilitating bout of colon cancer. Citing her father’s illness, the singer abruptly canceled her planned three-year residency in Las Vegas and checked herself into a mental health facility for a month. In March, Wallet resigned as conservator. And then last month Jamie Spears is alleged to have gotten physical with one of his teenage grandsons. The boy’s father Kevin Federline filed for and was granted a restraining order, after which Jamie Spears moved to temporarily cede his conservatorship to Spears’ care manager Jodi Montgomery.

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None of which went unnoticed by the singer’s devoted fans, who speculated wildly that Britney Spears was a prisoner, forcibly medicated and slaving away to satisfy her grasping relatives. A query of my own teenage kids produced the theory that Spears had ruined her voice because her evil family forced her to sing “wrong.” Hence the #FreeBritney Tweets and the crowds protesting the “Toxic Conservatorship.”

If Spears herself finds the arrangement “toxic,” she hasn’t let on. But it appears she did take ask the court in a May hearing to evaluate the ongoing necessity of the conservatorship. Multiple outlets reported that Judge Brenda Penny ordered a review, with a status update in September, which may have hit a roadblock when Spears’ doctor died suddenly in August. (Twitter has theories!)

Which brings us to yesterday where … NOTHING HAPPENED.

After clearing the courtroom, Judge Penny seems to have authorized routine payment of the conservator, listened to various lawyers for an hour, and then set another hearing date for January 31.

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Then the protesters rolled up their signs. The Tweeters convened to invent  new hashtags. The paparazzi packed up their cameras. The conservator went back to cashing checks. And Britney went back to the gym.

View this post on Instagram

Skinny jeans ???? ????????here I come !!!

A post shared by Britney Spears (@britneyspears) on Sep 16, 2019 at 6:00pm PDT

But they’ll all be back next quarter for another round. Hit me baby one more time.

Britney Spears hasn’t fully controlled her life for years. Fans insist it’s time to #FreeBritney [LATimes]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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