The Weekend Wag tackles an enduring Hollywood obsession.
What right do any of us have to mess up our lives?
The question arises because it’s impossible to wander far in America these days without running into Britney Spears. There are good reasons to avoid this topic, among them that there’s already enough written about Spears, her conservatorship, and hoped-for liberation, to fill the great library of Alexandria. Also, it’s a subject that tends to get people exceedingly worked up. A very small disclosure: In my quixotic career, I’ve had a glancing exposure to the world of Britney Spears. I know it’s not a simple place, but our current media ecosystem is not friendly to nuance. Still, something perverse compels me to try.
This week, Spears scored a victory in the battle to change the restrictive form of guardianship that she has lived under for 13 years. Until very recently, her attempts to remove her father, James P. Spears, from control of a fortune worth upwards of $60 million have been largely tucked away from public view. We now know this conflict dates back to at least 2014, but dislodging Mr. Spears (and a battery of lawyers) from a powerful position hasn’t been easy. On August 12, Jamie Spears resigned his conservatorship, with a few parting shots at those he feels have maligned him as the villain of the piece. Social media celebrations aside, his departure doesn’t mean Spears is in command of her destiny.
As Spears obsessives know, the entertainer is actually under two forms of legal custodianship — conservatorship of her estate, and conservatorship of her person. A new conservator will presumably be found to look after her business interests, while Jodi Pais Montgomery, a professional fiduciary with a degree in social work, continues to oversee the star’s personal life (that, too, was under Jamie Spears’s purview until 2019). Spears has asked for her conservatorship/s be terminated without further psychiatric evaluation, but that is for a judge to decide. So, recent events might best be viewed as an incremental step forward in an arduous struggle to reclaim something like full personhood. Most of all, it illustrates just how difficult it can be for those deemed legally incompetent to reassert control over their affairs.
Anybody who has walked the streets of our cities in 2021 knows that America’s treatment of those with mental illness is abysmal. What is interesting in Spears’s case is that it may be the rare one where wealth and fame actually put an individual at a disadvantage. Would Spears be in an arrangement that surrenders all decisions about her life and money to others if millions were not at stake? Would a temporary form of custody have persisted for more than a decade if she were not Britney Spears? Thanks to the attention Spears’s case has drawn, U.S. Senators have directed the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice to gather data on conservatorships, which are regulated by the states and poorly studied, though the National Council on Disability estimates that some 1.3 million Americans (and billions in assets) are under some form of guardianship. Not surprisingly, civil libertarians and disability rights advocates argue that these legal devices are too often used as a first, rather than a last resort—especially where money is involved.
There are circumstances where an individual, as the expression goes, is a danger to herself and others. But once a conservatorship is established, it can be difficult to end. We don’t have a clear picture of how many people regain their independence after a period of guardianship. We don’t know how many arrangements instituted as a stopgap end up becoming permanent. What’s clear is that a person who finds herself the ward of others will likely have to prove her competence to win back her legal rights, including the right to hire her own attorney, while underwriting the situation she finds abusive. Spears, who has likened her situation to being a victim of human trafficking, was only able to pick her own counsel in July. Penniless criminal defendants have far more latitude when it comes to seeking representation.
How did we get here? Revisiting Spears’s life in 2008 is like traipsing through a minefield, but few dispute that she was in crisis. I don’t remember this period as some sort of gleefully sadistic tabloid carnival, but as a scary time, when people who cared for her were genuinely frightened. She was placed under two involuntary psychiatric holds and hospitalized. Prompted by family concerns, a temporary conservatorship was established. (Jamie Spears, the literal personification of the patriarchy in the current narrative, was initially lauded as a concerned father). Later that year, Spears was somewhat obliquely likening her situation to being “in jail,” in an MTV documentary. But it’s important to note that while her situation was colorfully covered, it was never forensically explained. “Breakdown” is a tabloid headline, not a medical diagnosis.
At least once, Spears has alluded to having bipolar disorder, a condition the National Institutes of Mental Health conservatively estimates affects about 2.8 percent of Americans, or 7 million people, most of whom are fully in control of their lives. Beyond this, there has never been a thorough explanation of why Spears needed such extraordinary guardrails, while any number of other prominent, troubled people, most of them male, have not. She continued to perform, released several albums, and on occasion, gave proscribed interviews. In 2016, she briefly addressed her circumstances while promoting her album Glory on Britain’s Jonathan Ross Show: “Okay, so I have this conservatorship. I’ve been under this conservatorship for three years and I felt like a lot of decisions were made for me, so I wanted [this record] to be my baby and I’ve been really strategic about it.”
It wasn’t that smart people didn’t have lots of questions about what was actually going on with Spears. It’s that these questions, even when the rare opportunity arose, were not directed to her, and ultimately, her voice on these matters is the one that matters most. In 2019, Spears spent time in a mental health facility, and the podcast Britney’s Gram suggested she was being held against her will. This galvanized the fan-led #FreeBritney movement, which in turn prompted the 2020 New York Times/Hulu documentary Framing Britney Spears, now nominated for two Emmys. Without the drumbeat from fans, it seems that doubtful the Times, the New Yorker, and other powerful outlets would have rediscovered Spears. When Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren agree you are the victim of an injustice, the wind of public opinion is at your back. Still, it wasn’t until this past June that Spears herself began really talking.
What she had to say — in emotional testimony given in two court hearings— is disturbing. Spears claimed that she has been forced to work nonstop, take lithium, undergo psychiatric evaluations, and most shockingly, wear an intrauterine device to prevent pregnancy. These allegations prompted multiple resignations within her conservatorship team and paved the way for the hiring of an able lawyer, former prosecutor Matthew Rosengart, to represent her. They also evoked the very dark history of mental health care in Hollywood —the Frances Farmer days of snake pits, lobotomies, and forced sterilizations. “This conservatorship is doing me way more harm than good,” Spears said. “I deserve to have a life.” Who can argue with that?
I do not know Britney Spears. Very few people can say they do. From fleeting moments of acquaintance, I recall her as a very polite, shy person, attended to by a lot of other people, with hair and skin groomed to Olympian radiance. That does not go very far, though I can give you feathery bits of trivia, such as that at one point she told a colleague she really liked Jane the Virgin. I have known quite a few good people who have worked closely with Spears over the years, and they invariably speak about her in a protective, parental way. Many times, I’ve heard an adult woman, who commands a global audience, bottom-lined as “such a sweet girl.” I’m sure that’s true. Still, it makes me wonder if anybody really knows Britney Spears at all.
Celebrity, of the kind that Spears has been cursed with, has always been a mixture of exposure and mystery. By choice or constraint, she has never revealed very much about her life, and that scarcity has juiced public fascination. That’s led all of us to develop the very bad habit of speaking for her, filling in the blanks for a persona that has always been characterized by a sort of outward-facing blankness. Thousands of people have psychoanalyzed Spears based on a few enigmatic utterances, song lyrics that hint at chafing under somebody's thumb, and Instagram posts. She has been described as a feminist martyr, a millennial touchstone, and most blandly, as a pop culture icon. Whatever the truth of her existence, she is presented to us, over and over again, as a being in suspended animation.
All of this — at such a volume that one might call it a minor media industry—is dust in the wind when compared to whatever Spears wants for herself. Maybe, she’s not tapping out elaborate messages in code. Maybe, like the rest of us, she’s simply figuring things out as she goes along. If granted full control over her body, life, and work, she may make dreadful mistakes, run through her millions, and find herself in dire straights. There’s a very good chance of that in life. It seems to me that the least she deserves is a basic human opportunity to try.
Brilliant distillation of Brit chaos