Britney Spears Took the Stand and Affirmed the #FreeBritney People Were Right All Along

A conservatorship is a situation where a judge appoints a person or entity to make decisions on behalf of an adult whom the judge feels is unable to make those decisions themselves. This could be due to a number of reasons, such as old age, handicap or illness.

These conservatorships are only meant to last as long as the conservatee actually requires one. The point is to help people who need help, not to take the power to run their own lives away from capable adults.

Britney Spears has been under conservatorship since she had a mental health episode in 2008; this is when she shaved her head and was all over the news, to the point that South Park made an episode about her poor treatment by the press and paparazzi. She was also on How I Met Your Mother around this time, and she did a much better job than a lot of non-actors who appear on sitcoms.

People have been questioning for a long time now if Spears actually needed to be under conservatorship at all; after all, she seemed fine and it had been over a decade. She may have some mental health struggles, but a lot of people have mental health problems and don’t need a conservatorship.

It made some amount of sense for Spears to be given a conservator while she was in the middle of a mental break, but she appeared mostly recovered by the end of the year. She’s recorded albums and was a judge on The X-Factor during her conservatorship, which don’t seem like things that someone who doesn’t have the wherewithal to make their own decisions about their life would be able to do.

During all this time, however, Spears assured her fans she was okay and never asked to end the conservatorship, giving the impression that she didn’t mind the arrangement.

This was not the case. Spears was not okay, she just didn’t want people to know that.

It certainly explains why fans thought something seemed off about her social media posts. No one was forcing her to make them as some suspected, but she was forcing herself to seem happy and upbeat when she wasn’t.

Spears finally took the stand and asked the judge to end her conservatorship recently. It’s heartbreaking to learn that the reason it took her so long to ask for the conservatorship to be ended is that she didn’t realize that was an option.

Spears spoke to the judge herself and asked to end her conservatorship without an evaluation and described her situation as akin to be sex trafficked, saying she was forced to perform against her will and forced onto lithium when she objected.

NPR transcribed what appears to be Spears’ entire statement to the court, so let’s look at what she said in her own words.

The people who did this to me should not get away and be able to walk away so easily. Recap: I was on tour in 2018. I was forced to do. My management said if I don’t do this tour, I will have to find an attorney and by contract my own management could sue me if I didn’t follow through with the tour. He handed me a sheet of paper as I got off the stage in Vegas and said I had to sign it. It was very threatening and scary and with the conservatorship, I couldn’t even get my own attorney. So out of fear, I went ahead and I did the tour. When I came off that tour, a new show in Las Vegas was supposed to take place. I started rehearsing early, but it was hard cause I’d been doing Vegas for four years and I needed a break in between.

It’s becoming clearer why Spears said she wasn’t going to perform again until her father was removed as her conservator. There’s more.

There was a week period where they — they were nice to me and they said, “I don’t want to do —” And I told them, “I don’t want to do the —” They, wait, no — they were nice to me. They said, if I don’t want to do the new Vegas show, I don’t have to cause I was getting really nervous. I said, “I can wait.” It was like, they told me I could wait. It was like lifting literally 200 pounds off of me when they said I don’t have to do the show anymore cause it was — I was really, really hard on myself and it was too much.

I couldn’t take it anymore. So I remember telling my assistant, “But you know what, I feel weird if I say no. I feel like they’re going to come back and be mean to me or punish me or something.” 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. All of this was a false. He — he immediately the next day put me on lithium out of nowhere. He took me off my normal meds I’d 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. I really couldn’t even take up for myself. I couldn’t even have a conversation with my mom or dad really about anything. I told them I was scared and my doctor had me on — six different nurses with this new medication come to my home, stay with me to monitor me on this new medication, which I never wanted to be on to begin with.

She also discussed how she feels about the conservatorship and about her father being in control.

And that’s why I’m telling you this again two years later, after I’ve lied and told the whole world I’m OK and I’m happy. It’s a lie. I thought I just — maybe I said that enough, maybe I might become happy because I’ve been in denial. I’ve been in shock. I am traumatized, you know, fake it till you make it. But now I’m telling you the truth, OK? I’m not happy. I can’t sleep. I’m so angry. It’s insane and I’m depressed. I cry every day. And the reason I’m telling you this is because I don’t think how the state of California can have all this written in the court documents from the time I showed up and do absolutely nothing. Just hire — with my money — another person to keep — and keep my dad on board. Ma’am, my dad and anyone involved in this conservatorship and my management —who played a huge role in punishing me when I said, “No, ma’am” — they should be in jail. Their cruel tactics working for Miley Cyrus. If she smokes on joints and stage at the VMAs, nothing is ever done to this generation for doing wrong things. But my precious body, whose work for my dad for the past f***ing 13 years, trying to be so good and pretty. So perfect when he works me so hard, when I do everything I’m told, and the state of California allowed my ignorant father to take his own daughter, who only has a role with me if I work with him. They set back the whole course and allowed him to do that to me? That’s given these people I’ve worked for way too much control.

Let me try and parse that for you, because it’s a little hard to follow.

Spears described being forced into rehab as a punishment for not wanting to work and make more money than she wasn’t allowed to use without the approval of the people who could spend it to make the public think that them spending her money was a good thing. She then mentioned Miley Cyrus can smoke pot onstage at the VMAs and no one cares, while she said previously that she doesn’t even drink alcohol.

She also doesn’t understand why the state has ordered her to pay companies and her father to control her and her finances in a way she says was abusive and essentially slavery.

I want changes and I want changes going forward. I deserve changes. I was told I have to sit down and be evaluated — again — if I want to end the conservatorship. Ma’am, I didn’t know I could petition the conservatorship to end it. I’m sorry for my ignorance, but I honestly didn’t know that. But honestly, which I don’t think I owe anyone to be evaluated. I’ve done more than enough. I don’t feel like I should even be in a room with anyone to offend me by trying to question my capacity of intelligence, whether I need to be in this stupid conservatorship or not. I’ve done more than enough. I don’t owe these people anything. Especially me, the one that is roofed and fed tons of people on tour on the road. It’s embarrassing and demoralizing what I’ve been through. And that’s the main reason I’ve never said it openly. And mainly I didn’t want to say it openly because I honestly don’t think anyone would believe me. To be honest with you, the Paris Hilton story on what they did to her, at that school, I didn’t believe any of it. I’m sorry, I’m an outsider. And I’ll just be honest, I didn’t believe it. And maybe I’m wrong. And that’s why I didn’t want to say any of this to anybody, to the public, because people would make fun of me or laugh at me and say, “She’s lying. She’s got everything. She’s Britney Spears.” I’m not lying. I just want my life back. And it’s been 13 years and it’s enough.

Britney Spears doesn’t need to work. She has an estimated net worth of sixty million dollars. That’s more than enough for anyone to live on for their entire life. Her management and her father would like her to work to make money for them and are clearly using mental health treatment as a means to punish her when she doesn’t do what they want. She also described some pretty disturbing behavior from her father.

I was told — I had to then after I got a phone call from my dad saying after I did the psych test with this lady, basically saying I had failed the test or whatever — whatever. “I’m sorry, Britney, you have to listen to your doctors. They are planning to send you to a small home in Beverly Hills to do a small rehab program that we’re going to make up for you. You’re gonna pay $60,000 a month for this.”

I cried on the phone for an hour and he loved every minute of it. The control he had over someone as powerful as me as he loved the control to hurt his own daughter, 100,000%. He loved it.

Clearly, what happens next is in the judge’s hands. But it’s hard for me to imagine that Spears needs a conservator. She clearly made some mistakes in her testimony, like saying she was forced to give eight gallons of blood a week; the human body has about 10-12 pints of blood and you can safely donate one of those pints every two months. I assume she meant that she had 8 blood tests a week, presumably to test for drugs.

Almost no one looks great when their words are transcribed verbatim, and if you want to make someone look extra dumb you’ll transcribe their verbal tics, the “ums”, “ands” and “likes” people are prone to say. But the question here isn’t “Is Britney Spears maybe a little dumb?” The question is if she’s capable of managing her own affairs.

Think about all your co-workers in your current job. There’s definitely someone there you think is just the dumbest person you’ve ever met and you’ve probably been honestly concerned they die because they forgot how to breathe. How hard is it to make a pot of coffee, Janet? Can’t you at least turn the hot plate off so the last dregs of the pot don’t burn themselves into the carafe? And yet, that person is not under a conservatorship. Do you really think Britney Spears is less able to manage her own affairs than Janet in HR?