The New Yorker Radio Hour - Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino Investigate Britney Spears’s Conservatorship

Episode Date: July 3, 2021

Britney Spears has been one of the world’s most prominent pop stars since her début, in the late nineteen-nineties. But, since 2008, she’s been under a court-ordered conservatorship—a form of legal guardianship—which has restricted nearly all aspects of her life. Details about the arrangement have been kept out of public view, all while Spears has continued to turn out records and perform lucrative shows, earning millions of dollars for those around her. But the pop star is now directly confronting the people and structures that have ruled her life for the past decade. In recent court testimony, Spears openly detailed her experience under the conservatorship for the first time. She demanded her liberty and expressed her anger, profound sadness, and frustration. She even alleged that her conservatorship, which is led by her father, prevented her from getting an IUD removed from her body, which the family denies. The staff writers Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino have investigated how Spears wound up in this situation, in the article “Britney Spears’s Conservatorship Nightmare.” They speak with David Remnick about Spears’s life under relentless public scrutiny, her cultural significance, and the thorny legal problems posed by conservatorships. “Conservatorships essentially deem someone incapacitated,” Tolentino says. “And from that point, because they do remove your rights by necessity, they sort of foreclose the possibility of proving or gaining capacity to anyone under it.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Brittany Spears has been one of the biggest pop stars on earth since her debut in the late 90s. But since 2008, she's been under a court-ordered conservatorship, a form of legal guardianship that has strictly controlled the details of her personal and family life, her finances, her career, even her birth control. Details about the arrangement have long been kept out of public view, all while Spears has continued to turn out records and perform lucrative shows earning millions of dollars for others around her. But Spears and her lawyers are now mounting a challenge to end her conservatorship,

inspiring the long-standing slogan, Free Brittany. In recent court testimony, we heard Britney Spears detail her experience under that conservatorship, and she demanded her liberty in terms of her time. tones that ranged from outrage to sadness to deepest frustration. She even alleged that her conservatorship, which is led by her father, prevented her from getting an IUD removed from her body. The New Yorkers Ronan Farrow and Gia Tolentino have now written a long and deeply reported piece explaining Brittany's story and its cultural significance. Welcome, Ronan and Gia. It's good to talk to you. Thanks, David. Thank you. Now, Gia, for a certain generation, I think,

you and Ronan fit into it. Brittany Spears was an explosive presence on the pop cultural scene. So explain that for the rest of us why she is so important and still is. So I think for people, you know, maybe within 10 years of the age that Ronan and I are, you hear this sort of three-beat opening shot of baby one more time. And you remember this time, you know, in 1999 where one day you had never heard of Britney Spears and the next day, she was this sort of white, hot, molten center of American pop culture in a way that really nobody but Madonna was before her and nobody but Beyonce has been since.

And there was a sexual allure too, and you could say that about any number of pop acts beginning with Elvis Presley, but there was also some dimension of her, just how young she was and what she was playing at consciously or not. Yeah, and famously, this is the issue about Britney Spears that has defined her public narrative and still comes into play with the conservatorship today. So, sort of what extent is her existence being shaped or manufactured or controlled by the demands of a system around her that is, you know, kind of flawed and punishing? Or to what extent is it her own desire? And this was, as you mentioned, it's hypercharged around her because she's a teenager when she gets famous. and she is on the cover of Rolling Stone in her underwear clutching a telotubby, you know, talking on a, talking on a corded phone.

And the thing about Britney Spears is that, I mean, she was, she fulfilled in this almost, this incredibly complex, confusing, charged way, this combination of, of innocence and knowingness of sort of, you know, she, she was questioned about a virginity on TV. and then she radiated this sort of impossible sexual command that many people wanted to believe, you know, she was, that she was generating, others wanted to believe was sort of forced upon her. But it was, you know, Britney Spears, her image has always been, she's lived sort of as a projection of our broad societal fears and desires, right? The fear of the fear of young female sexuality and the craving for it at the same time. Brittany Spears lived a life in the public eye, and there came a time, didn't it year, where it seemed almost as if she was breaking down. What happened and when? I think to contextualize, you know, the mid-aughts breakdown that, you know, probably most people listening to this know about is to, I think we have to go back to just how famous she was so quickly.

You know, I spoke to somebody that went on tour with Britney Spears on her very first tour in 1999, and already she's so famous. famous that she can't walk down the street without getting stampeded. By the year 2000, you know, she's 18. She can't go out to lunch without being mobbed by paparazzi. Fans are rocking the tour bus so hard it's going to tip over. And she is working at a breakneck pace. So this is beginning when she is 17 years old. And by the time, you know, let's say she's 24, this is right around the time that she's southern. She is a traditional southern girl. She had always said in interviews that she wanted to get married and have children. I think by the time Brittany is 24 or so, she feels that she has lived, you know, 7,000 lifetimes and is ready to start a family

and ready to maybe take a break for a second. And so around 2004, she meets, she meets a dancer named Kevin Federline in a nightclub and sort of sets her sights on him as this solution to the problem. She's going to start a family. They're going to get married. And they do very quickly. They're married within six months of meeting. And she has a child almost immediately. three months after having her first child, she gets pregnant with another one. And she becomes known in the press as a mess and a bad mother. You know, she and Kevin get divorced. She is without her children. And famously, the two nights that sort of cemented her image as quote unquote crazy were the nights that she shaved her head and then the night that she attacked a paparazzi's car with an umbrella. And something

that's been a bit lost is that directly preceding both of those incidents, she had gone to Kevin Federline's house to ask to see the children, followed by photographers, and then been refused with all of the photographers documenting it. And the sort of humiliation and the loneliness that I imagine she must have felt as a young mother underneath all of this scrutiny, you know, she said it herself in the very few interviews she's given about this period that she didn't know what to do with herself, that she couldn't stand to be at home because for her, the babies represented home for her. So, Ronan, now we get to the point where the legal world kicks in, and Brittany's father and others form something called a conservatorship. Can you explain that?

So a conservatorship, it's known as a guardianship in a lot of states, is a legal structure where someone's personal and economic decision-making power gets transferred to someone else, a conservator or a guardian. And it's often applied to people who are older, who have severe disabilities. You know, the conventional conservat is someone who really lacks capacity and is not high functioning. And one thing that we're able to lay out through the original reporting we've done in this article is the story of how this conservatorship came together and some of the motivations behind it. And what we've learned is that this was really born of a complex cocktail of, yes, sincere concerns about Britney Spears's well-being, her struggles with addiction, her mental health, from family members who profess to sincerely want the best for her. However, what we also see is a family riven by dependency on her financially for many years, fear of love.

losing their financial access to her and control of her life. And a very deliberate process of establishing a trap, essentially, that Britney Spears walked into. And we chronicle in detail the days in which that happened. And one of the things that is most consequential that emerges in this narrative is one of the family friends who was present for those events, present in the courtroom when the conservatorship was approved, present for. present for all of the confrontations leading up to it, and who offered testimony that is prominent in all of the legal documents supporting the legal structures around Britney Spears

is now on the record with us saying she has profound regrets about what happened there, that she didn't understand what a conservatorship was, was told it would be temporary, and, you know, she tells us point blank, I thought I was helping, and I wasn't. I helped, she says, quote, a criminal family sees control of Britney's life in a way that, you know, even she, part of the foundations of this arrangement, is really dubious of. So how did Britney Spears' life change in practical terms under this conservatorship? Profoundly so. You know, she in the last few days has finally spoken in open court and gave searing testimony saying that she feels enslaved is a word that she used, that she's

feels like she has been robbed of her ability to make decisions about her life, her career, whether she works or not, the kind of medical attention she receives. She says that she has been involuntarily placed on lithium and other drugs, that she's not comfortable with the medicating decisions being made for her. She says that she has an IUD in her and would like to remove it to have a family and is not being allowed to do that. So basic questions of bodily autonomy, you know, are at stake here. And she says that this is traumatic and inappropriate. And, you know, I want to note this isn't simple, David. Multiple judges have now presided over this conservatorship. We're told by sources associated with her camp that maintains the conservatorship,

that there are, you know, genuine mental health diagnoses that require attention. But what legal experts who have looked at the situation say, and what a lot of people who are who are close to the conservatorship, who now have doubts about it, say, is one can have serious and significant mental health or addiction struggles, and the correct policy decision is not necessarily to take away most of their adult rights. I'm not lying. I just want my life back, and it's been 13 years, and it's enough. It's been a long time since I've owned my money, and it's my wish and my dream for all

of this to end without being tested. Again, it makes no sense whatsoever for the state of California to sit back and literally watch me with their own two eyes make a living for so many people and pay so many people trucks and buses on tour on the road with me and be told I'm not good enough but I'm great at what I do and I allow these people to control what I do ma'am and it's enough it makes no sense at all. Gia this conservatorship began in 2008 it's now 13 years later why is it taken so long for this to become a controversy, a public matter in the way it has. I know that there's been a free Britannia movement has been around for a while,

but it's really reached its zenith now. I think that there are several underlying factors. I'll start with the dimension to it that is well-meaning. I think that there was something of a media retreat in sort of apology for past invasiveness, right? I think that there's also, as the discourse around mental health, health has developed. And by the way, you know, we spoke to so many people that were close to Brittany around the time she had her children and they said nobody brought up postpartum depression

at the time. You know, I think that it's something that many people have brought up. It's something that certainly I can understand in a visceral way right now that dealing with, you know, even ordinary postpartum depression, let alone that with flash bulbs, you know, with men climbing the palm trees in your backyard and taking pictures of you and your infant, you know, it would lead, it would lead me to self-medicate personally. I can just say that for myself. And anyway, so as the discourse around mental health has become more compassionate, there's also become an understanding that, you know, for a family dealing with a member in genuine mental health crisis, sometimes actions have to be taken that don't make sense to outsiders, right? So people have thought, you know, this is an extreme

structure that is supposed to be for, you know, 95-year-olds with severe dementia. And if Britney Spears is under it and if the court is supervising it and if they're going back in hearings every year, then there must be some sort of airtight medical reason for this to exist. And this is the narrative that her camp by sealing so many court procedures, by sealing off the records, by, you know, if we go by what Brittany said in the hearing, by not, you know, by not telling her that she could terminate it, by doing all. they could to keep it going, it seems like the camp has wanted the public to think, you know, this wouldn't, this wouldn't exist for a reason. The system is not set up for abuse. But we've

spoken to lawyers to disability rights experts who point out that, you know, conservatorships are often also recommended for children with disabilities once they turn 18. And this is something that the ACLU and others have been fighting against, sort of saying that once you, conservatives essentially deem someone incapacitated. And from that point, point, because they do remove your rights by necessity, they sort of foreclose the possibility of proving or gaining capacity to anyone under it. And so in a way, you know, it's, it's, in a way, the conservatorship structure is almost self-perpetuating, because, which is why I think the ACLU is recommending that this should be an option of last resort, because once you're in it,

with, you know, almost always with counsel that you did not appoint that the court chose for you, you know, you sort of lose the ability to contest it as Brittany spoke to in court. Ronan, let's talk about the conservators in less abstract terms. Who are these conservators? And what are their motives? So for years, Jamie Spears, Brittany Spears's father, was the conservator of both her personal and financial affairs. And in more recent years, Britney Spears has objected repeatedly to this, and he has been removed as the conservator of her person, and a temporary conservator has been appointed by the court, a professional who specializes in doing that. Nevertheless, Jamie Spears, her father, still exerts a tremendous amount of control over her life. We talked to multiple sources around and close to this conservatorship who felt that Sam Ingham,

Britney Spears' court-appointed lawyer, is loyal to Jamie and the conservatorship first and Britney second, and that certain personal things that she was reporting to Ingham were being fed back to Jamie in a way that many of these spectators found uncomfortable and inappropriate. So you have a situation where, you know, the norm in these cases is that having family members as guardians is a positive, and it means you have someone caring, calling the shots. But Britney Spears, who really tests the edges of this kind of a structure as a high-functioning individual who has during this conservatorship raked in millions of dollars and danced and sang and done all kinds of things that are very sophisticated and require a lot. of autonomy, you have a case where she is actively saying, I'm an adult and I don't want my father in this role. And we're hearing from many of the sources we spoke to that that is an understandable request. And to be clear, Ronan, we reached out to the lawyer Sam Ingham several times,

and he didn't respond. And a representative for Jamie Spears declined to answer specific questions. So Ronan, what liberated her in the end? It was just a few years ago that we started hearing that phrase, free Brittany. So in some sense, what allowed Britney Spears to speak for herself? You know, it seems like there was a confluence of events inside and outside of this conservatorship that led up to it being weakened in some ways. And this path that we're now seeing where there genuinely does seem to be a possibility that this will end after so many years. you know, you saw Britney Spears fans banding together and saying, hey, this situation doesn't seem right or normal. It doesn't seem like we're hearing from her that she's okay with this. And we

chronicle a couple of the first movers who kind of set that off and transformed it into a movement. And then at the same time, Britney Spears, who I think according to both people we've talked to end some of the posts that we've seen from her. And of course, there is dispute as to how much is written by her and how much is doctored by people around her. And we get into that in the piece. But it seems like a preponderance of the evidence shows that she feels conflicted about that movement,

that she at times feels that it's been invasive. She feels hurt when she is portrayed as a victim in this. But nevertheless, it does seem like in that same period of time, she has become emboldened too and started pushing for changes like her father being at least partially removed from a position of control. And at the same time, I think that there is a wider cultural reassessment of the way women are treated in the media, the way women are treated in certain kinds of legal structures

and proceedings. And all of this has come together into a time where people are taking a second look at something that, for the most part, is a pretty unregulated corner of the court system. What is the situation with Britney Spears and attorneys, One of the shocking things you write about is how at various times she tried to get an attorney, but that lawyer was somehow disqualified. And the judge said that Britney Spears doesn't somehow have the legal capacity to hire her own counsel. What happened there?

This is one of the most striking facets of the story when we assess this question of, you know, does she genuinely want to be out of this situation? How much autonomy does she really have? How high functioning is she? What we've seen from almost day one of this conservatorship is, Brittany Spears has fought to get counsel other than the court-appointed lawyer that she has. And she has done things like, you know, jumping out of a car and running into a hotel to rendezvous with someone who would give her a phone so she could call an attorney. She's a secret meeting that we chronicle in the steam room of a different hotel where a contact passed her a cell phone in a Ziploc bag and then she tried to use that to get to lawyers.

And, you know, on multiple occasions, she's been thwarted. You know, in that case, Jamie Spears, her father, became aware of that contraband phone, and the phone was taken from her. Ronan Farrow and Gia Tolentino. Our conversation continues in a moment. Ronan, just to be clear, is money at the root of the story? Are people in the conservatorship and people around her trying to fleece her? Of course, her family members deny this.

They say they just want the best for their daughter and they're concerned for her well-being. But David, Brittany Spears says in court, sounding pretty lucid, that that's exactly what's happening. That it's about money. That she has been fleeced. That it is about money, that her money has been taken from her, that it's unjust. And, you know, in talking to two dozen sources around the beginning, middle, and present day of this conservatorship, we've heard over and over again that there is something to that argument. And I think that both can be true. families are complicated. Fame has a complicated and destructive influence on families. Not that I'd know anything about that, David. And, you know, what we see here is people struggling

through a difficult situation, I think difficult for all, but also, you know, individuals around Spears in her family who have been on her payroll for years and years and years in one form or another, who have made a lot of money off of her, an attorney even, her court-appointed attorney, who makes more a year, as of the most recent filings, than she has an annual living expenses. So correctly, questions are being raised, both by people on the inside and the outside, about whether this is right and fair.

Could I add something about the money thing? Please. So I think also another way in which money plays into this is that one of the big reasons that conservatorship is established by their family is that, you know, as she is behaving erratically and sort of in this genuine crisis around the possible loss of custody of her sons,

which really, I think, is the bedrock of everything that happened to her in 2007 and 2008. They are worried that she is going to blow through her money, right, that she's going to end up underwater on her mortgage, that she's going to go bankrupt. One thing that I want to point out here about this and about the question of, you know, are there, you know, does she struggle with mental health or addiction issues

is that, you know, part of being an adult in, the free world is that you are legally allowed to make bad decisions, right? I think there is something to the fact that she got famous as a teenager given the sort of, she got famous as a teenager who was asked to fulfill these sort of adult fantasies, and she has been treated like a child ever since. She, you know, we are perfectly comfortable when many male celebrities gamble their fortunes away and end up in debt. Nobody thinks we should save them from themselves by putting them in a conservatorship, right? But I think from the beginning, something that has defined Britney Spears' life, arguably, is this question that has hung over her, you know, both culturally and now really through

this legal structure of what people think is best for her, what we want from her, what so many people want from her, and what we want to take from her. That has really defined the shape of her in a way that, you know, I think we're now seeing as, you know, we're now coming to this reckoning with the way that that's unjust. And, you know, it's something that many of the sort of legal advocates we talk to, they point out, you know, people, people with sincere intellectual disabilities, people with, people with ongoing mental health issues, there's a wide range of alternatives between you're left out on your own with no assistance to manage your life, which really none of us does. We all rely on people to help us through our lives and help

us make decisions. And a conservatorship, right? There's, they're conditional swinging powers of attorney, right? There's, which kicks in when you, if you enter a period of crisis, you share your power attorney for that period. There's sort of a formal shared control over your financial life, but not over your personal life or your medical decisions when you're not in crisis, right? There's so many alternatives to the structure. It's not, it's not like she either has to be out on her own or it's this. One of the things that we describe in the story, which is one of the first windows we have into what happened behind the scenes that led to the creation of this structure is a moment in which Britney Spears has just come back from her second 5150, which

is this involuntary psychological hold at the hospital. And she's newly home. She's clearly going through a lot. This conservatorship has just been created very much on the fly. And we lay out some pretty shocking things about its creation, including the fact that she really did not get to testify. And there really wasn't a detailed fact finding in the way that I think many people would have expected. And even at that very early point, you know, we have a source inside the room recalling her father saying to her, you're fat, daddy's going to get you on a diet and a trainer, and you're going to get back in shape. And there was a TV nearby. And he said, you see that TV over there, you know what they're going to say in eight weeks. They're going to say you're on there

and you're back. And the person who was there for this process and backed up the creation of the conservatorship really helped with it, said that was a turning point where she started raising the same question you just asked David about motive and where she really realized in her mind this is not about getting her well and then getting her back to being honest. autonomous. This is about getting her back to making money. And, you know, as I've mentioned a few times, the family disputes that, and I do think it's complicated. But I also think the preponderance of the evidence suggests there is a lot to that concern. Now I'm telling you the truth, okay? 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. ma'am, my dad and anyone involved in this conservatorship and my management who played a huge role in punishing at me when I said, no, ma'am, they should be in jail. But my precious body who's worked for my dad for the past fucking 13 years, trying to be so good and pretty, so perfect when he works me so hard, when I do everything I'm told in the state of California, allowed my father, 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. worked for way too much control. Gia, when you listen to that leaked audio of Britney Spears' testimony, what did you hear both in terms of information, but also on the level of emotion?

What I felt listening to that was I, so that there's this thing about Britney, right, always from the beginning. There is this, you know, X factor about her. There is something about Brittany. She has this unmistakable voice. she has or had at the peak of her career this unbelievable sharpness and command in performance. I think this is one of the reasons this saga has been so central in American pop culture in one way or another for the last 20 years, is that she gave off this ability to sort of absorb every terrible requirement and expectation that was thrown at her

and somehow surmounted because she's Britney Spears and she has this thing about her, this charisma, this will, this spark. And listening to her speak, I mean, I have thought so many times in the process of reporting the story, just hearing about the daily life of Britney Spears starting in 1999. I've thought if any one of us lived even one day under that kind of scrutiny, under that kind of pressure, we would buckle. We would have gone not just for the car. We would have gone for that guy's neck. You know what I mean? She has always been, she is, she is so much stronger than, than this structure has given her credit for. And listening to her speak, I was amazed that after 13 years of this, after, after an entire adult lifetime of being belittled and controlled, you know,

people attempting to control her in one way or another at so many levels, that she was able to still, you know, after 13 years of not being able to sign a contract, of being told over and over formally by this legal structure that you are not fit to decide anything about your own life, even as she is making millions and millions, tens of million dollars every year and supporting so many people. After all of that, after two decades of this, she was still able to come out in court and use her voice and speak her mind as clearly and assertively as she was able to. I was not shocked by it, but in that testimony, in the tone of her voice, you were reminded why she's Britney Spears, why she became so famous in the first place, and why we're all

still listening to her now. Ronan? I listened live to that testimony. I got formal court access. And one of the moments that struck me most in that testimony was actually before she began reading her statement, one of the lawyers for the conservatorship started saying, well, of course, if she mentions anything about the family, if she mentions anything about her medical situation, we're going to have to clear the court, and we're going to have to seal this up.

And she interjected loud and clear and said, no, I want to do this for the record. I want this to be public. Later in her testimony, she referenced wanting to give interviews and not having been able to. And I would call attention to that as an important facet of this. In Britney Spears's case, and in many other cases of alleged conservatorship abuse, silence is part of what makes the situation complicated and hard to change. And this is a bigger phenomenon than Britney Spears. She has shined a light on something that affects thousands

and thousands of conservatives who alongside all the many people who are in these situations where it's right and as it should be, are being exploited in some way. And we talked to a lot of lawyers, who specialize in this, who said, for most people, there is no way out. Once you're locked up in one of these things, it can be incredibly difficult to get out and that there are families all over the place without this profile, without this spotlight on them, where someone is placed in a situation

of this kind of control, their assets are liquefied, and their rights are taken away from them for good. So I think that this is going to trigger a wider conversation and a pretty overdue one. Ronan Farrow, Giotolentino, the piece about Brittany Spears is on New Yorker.com. Thank you so much. Guys, thank you. Thanks, David. Thank you. Ronan Farrow's revised and updated book, War on Peace, is out just now, as well as a documentary, Catch and Kill, airing on HBO this month.

Gia Tolentino is the author of Trick Mirror. And since we spoke, a judge denied Spears' request to remove her father from the conservatorship. Thanks for listening. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Riannon-Corby, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele,

Annabelle, Beacon, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. And we had additional help from Harrison, Keith, line. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trina Endowment Fund.