Jamie Spears Out As Britney’s Conservator. Now About That Wiretapping…

Yeah, no shit Jamie Spears wants out of his daughter’s conservatorship yesterday.

Britney Spears’s new lawyer Matthew Rosengart of Greenberg Traurig was already promising to audit every penny of the millions of dollars of her money the conservators spent over the past 13 years, and then three documentaries came out detailing the surveillance operation they ran on this woman.

According to the New York Times, Mr. Spears hired a private security firm which literally placed a bug in Ms. Spears’s bedroom to record her conversations with her children and her boyfriend. Alex Vaslov, an employee of the firm, was tasked with destroying a hard drive containing the material.

The drive, he discovered, contained audio recordings from a device that was secretly placed in Ms. Spears’s bedroom — more than 180 hours of recordings. Mr. Vlasov said he had thought the timing was curious because some of the recordings were made around the time that a court investigator visited Ms. Spears to perform a periodic review in September 2016.

Vaslov, who kept the hard drive and played the recordings for the Times, maintains that Spears’s phone was also monitored via her iCloud account, giving her father visibility on all her communications, even those with her own lawyer.

And so it’s hardly shocking that Mr. Spears did an abrupt about face this week, advocating for an immediate termination of the conservatorship he’d fought tooth and nail to maintain.

Here he is on August 6 railing against the motion to expedite hearing on his removal:

Throughout his service as Conservator, Mr. Spears’ 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 Conservatorship continues to exist, and Mr. Spears continues to do the job that he was appointed to do. This Court considered and denied a similar request to suspend Mr. Spears in November 2020, finding no basis to suspend Mr. Spears. (See Exhibit A, Minute Order dated November 10, 2020.) Just as before, there are absolutely no grounds to suspend Mr. Spears and this request, if it is reached at all (which should not be), should be denied

And here he is on September 7, arguing that the conservatorship should disappear immediately, do not pass Go, do not require a psychological evaluation:

Given Ms. Spears’s impassioned pleas to this Court and the clearly changed circumstances referred to above, it is in Ms. Spears’s best interest that the Court consider whether this conservatorship is still required or whether the grounds for establishment of this conservatorship of the person and estate no longer exist.

Gosh, what changed in just a month? It’s a mystery! Wonder if Rosengart’s comments on September 1 accusing Mr. Spears of a “blatant attempt to barter suspension and removal in exchange for approximately $2 million in payments, on top of the millions already reaped from Ms. Spears’s estate” had anything to do with it.

Yesterday Mr. Spears got his wish — sort of. L.A. County Superior Court Judge Brenda Penny terminated him as conservator of his daughter’s estate, saying, “I believe that the suspension is in the best interests of the conservatee. The current situation is untenable.”

But the court refused to grant his request to vanish the conservatorship in a magic puff of smoke, mooting the need for an accounting or further icky questions about who spent whose money and who tapped whose bedroom.

Tell us about it, Hollywood Reporter:

Things quickly got heated between Britney’s attorney Mathew Rosengart and Jamie’s lawyer Vivian Thoreen, who argued that ending the conservatorship entirely was the best course of action because it would moot all the other pending issues. “Given that Ms. Spears has indicated that she consents to termination,” Thoreen said, “there’s no need to discuss” the other petitions, including the suspension of her father.

She suggested that the court come up with an orderly manner to end the conservatorship without a protracted contentious and public fight, adding a request for a mandatory settlement conference and private mediation so the parties can assess issues of resources and cost to all parties. She also defended her client against claims that he had acted in bad faith during his tenure. “Mr. Spears has faithfully and loyally served,” she noted.

Over his strenuous objection, Judge Penny replaced Mr. Spears with CPA John Zabel and set a hearing date for November 12 to discuss terminating the conservatorship.

“Respectfully, the court was wrong to suspend Mr. Spears, put a stranger in his place to manage Britney’s estate, and extend the very conservatorship that Britney begged the court to terminate earlier this summer,” Mr. Spears snarked to THR. “Again, it was Mr. Spears who took the initiative to file the petition to terminate the conservatorship when neither Britney’s former court-appointed counsel nor her new privately-retained attorney would do so. It was Mr. Spears who asked the court at yesterday’s hearing to immediately terminate the conservatorship while Britney’s own attorney argued against it.”

You sound nervous, bro. Appropriately.

The Surveillance Apparatus That Surrounded Britney Spears [NYT]
Britney Spears’ Conservatorship: Father Suspended As Termination Hearing Is Set [Hollywood Reporter]

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