Thread by @CCCBuryStEd

Britney Spears

How her father and a team of lawyers seized control of her life and have held on to it for thirteen years.

A THREAD

#FreeBritney

L.A. County Judge Brenda Penny not only reminded those listening to Britney Spears’ testimony about the court policy against recording, but also against live-tweeting & told those physically in the courtroom that they needed to use a pen & paper instead of a laptop for notes.

The viral audio of the testimony began circulating just hours after the hearing, including in a YouTube post that has since been taken down because of a copyright claim from the court.

The next day, the court issued an announcement that, effective Monday, the remote audio attendance program would be shut down.L.A

Had it not been for that leaked audio, we would not have heard the visceral distress and anger in Britney Spears’ own voice when she described the conservatorship as abusive.

Her father, Jamie Spears, has since filed two documents in response to those claims.
- A petition asking Penny to “order an investigation into the issues and claims” she raised.
- A response to a pending motion regarding Jodi Montgomery.

In which Jodi Montgomery’s temporary role as conservator of Britney Spears’ person would be made permanent and which requests an evidentiary hearing. Jamie Spears claims he hasn’t had any input into his daughter’s medical care since 2019.

He challenges the contention that she doesn’t have capacity to consent to medical treatment. He also states that Britney’s court-appointed attorney Samuel D. Ingham III stated in the petition her incapacity was determined by a court order in October 2014.

He contends “there was no such finding, and there is no such order.”

The next hearing is currently set for July 14. Unless there’s a reversal of court policy, it will not be streamed. The Judicial Council, which is California’s policy-making arm, says it’s a local court decision

In court, Britney blamed her father for what happened to her and that everything had to be approved by him, Jamie said in his court papers that’s untrue. He said he doesn’t have any input in her medical treatment and has even been cut off from communicating with her.

He pinned the blame on Jodi Montgomery, a licensed private professional fiduciary, who was appointed in September 2019 to serve as Britney’s conservator over her person after Jamie stepped down from that role.

Jamie said that Montgomery has been the sole person in charge of Britney’s personal day-to-day care and medical treatment for the past two years and he doesn’t have any input in Britney’s medical treatment.

He said he never prevented Britney from getting married and even let her previous fiancé Jason Trawick serve as her co-conservator in 2012.

On July 3rd, Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino wrote about how Britney Spears’ father and a team of lawyers seized control of her life and held on to it for thirteen years.
In the article:

Since the establishment of Spears’s conservatorship, she has released four albums, headlined a global tour that grossed a hundred and thirty-one million dollars, and performed for four years in a hit Las Vegas residency.

Yet her conservators, who include her father, Jamie Spears, have controlled her spending, communications, and personal decisions
in an arrangement intended for people who cannot take care of themselves.

The June 23rd hearing had been requested in April, to discuss the terms of the arrangement in open court.

➡️ Members of Spears’s team, most of whom have had little or no direct contact with her for years, didn’t expect drastic changes to result.

➡️ Some of the team told reporters that they believed Spears liked the conservatorship arrangement, as long as her father wasn’t involved.

Running the business of Britney had become routine:

➡️ About 10 people meet every Thursday at noon, about ten people meet to discuss merchandise deals, song-license requests, and Spears’s posts to Instagram and Twitter.

“ This is how it works without her,” one member of the team said.

➡️ “ She’s not supposed to discuss the conservatorship,” the team member said.

On the eve of the hearing, Britney Spears called 911 to report herself as a victim of conservatorship abuse. (Emergency calls in California are generally accessible to the public, but the county, citing an ongoing investigation, sealed the records of her call.)

Members of Spears’s team began texting one another frantically. They were worried about what Spears might say the next day.

➡️ They discussed how to prepare in the event that she went rogue.

➡️➡️ In court on the 23rd, an attorney for the conservatorship urged the judge to clear the courtroom and seal the transcript of Spears’s testimony.

Oh, I bet he did.

Britney Spears, calling into the hearing, objected. “Somebody’s done a good job at exploiting my life,” she said, adding, “I feel like it should be an open-court hearing—they should listen and hear what I have to say.”

#BritneySpears
#FreeBritney

“ The people who did this to me should not get away,”

Spears described how she had been isolated, medicated, financially exploited, and emotionally abused and blamed the legal system for allowing it to happen.

She tried to complain to the court before but had been ignored, which made her feel “ like I didn’t matter.”

“ It concerns me I’ve been told I’m not allowed to expose the people who did this to me.”
#FreeBritney
#BritneySpears

“ Andrew Gallery, a photographer who worked for Spears in 2008, attended the hearing, watching the lawyers’ faces on a monitor. “As she spoke, I wanted to scream, and gasp, and shout ‘What the fuck is going on?’ ” he said. “But the lawyers had no reaction. They just sat there.””

➡️ The family was divided by money and fame, and Spears, in an underregulated part of the legal system, was stripped of her rights. She has fought for years to get them back.

➡️ Jacqueline Butcher, who was present in court for the conservatorship’s creation, said she regrets the testimony that she offered to help secure it. “At the time, I thought we were helping,” she said. “And I wasn’t, and I helped a corrupt family seize all this control.”

In a conversation in June, Britney’s mother Lynne spoke in a whisper and apologized that she might have to hang up abruptly if other family members walked in and discovered her speaking to a reporter.

“I got mixed feelings about everything,” she said. “I don’t know what to think. . . . It’s a lot of pain, a lot of worry.”

“I’m good. I’m good at deflecting.”

No shit.

“ In the spring of 2004, Spears met a dancer named Kevin Federline at a night club, and they were married within six months. Spears initially did not secure a prenuptial agreement, which prompted panic in her family. A considerable fortune was at stake. “Lynne lost her mind,””

She negotiated the hormonal and logistical turbulence of early motherhood while paparazzi, eager to monetize her mistakes, chased her down, pointing flashbulbs and shouting provocations any time she left the house.

A few months later, visibly pregnant and holding Preston, she stumbled while surrounded by photographers; the paparazzi kept shooting as she retreated to a café, cradled her baby, and cried.

“ Spears was the one who became the target of tabloid blood sport”

Jamie had become close to Lou Taylor, a business manager who shares the Spears family’s Christian faith and whose husband is a pastor at an evangelical church. Taylor later raised the possibility of putting Lindsay Lohan under a conservatorship, according to Lohan’s father.

In a recent interview, Courtney Love said that Taylor tried to wrest control over her family’s estate. Taylor, sources present at the time said, began attempting to contact Spears, efforts that Spears rebuffed.

“ It was really hard for her, having the kids for just a few hours. When she had to say goodbye, it was very sad—I would carry one to the car, and she would take the other, and they would cry a lot, and she would cry, too.” “

This is heartbreaking

“ Spears grew so lonely that she would sometimes ask the housekeeper if she could bring her own children to the house and stay the night.”

This really made me cry.

#FreeBritney

Federline was granted immediate sole custody of the children, and Spears’s visitation rights were suspended. It was widely assumed that Spears had endangered her children

but those who were around them disagree.

Robin Johnson, the court-ordered monitor, who saw Spears four times a week, said, “None of this was her fault.” “There were so many people involved in her life that caused all of this craziness . . . It was probably one of the saddest cases that I’ve ever done in my entire life.”

The heavy-handedness is just unbelievable.

#FreeBritney

In retrospect, Butcher feels that she was exploited. “I didn’t know how a conservatorship worked,” she said. “It was supposed to be temporary.”

The judge, since retired, arrived and announced the conservatorship had been granted. “The whole process was maybe ten minutes,”

Sam Ingham became Spears’s advocate.

The conservators’ petition to waive the requirement to notify her that any of this was happening, was granted.
Ingham remains and Spears covers his annual salary of $ 520,000.

( Her own living expenses in 2019 were $438,360.)

“On the petition to establish the arrangement, Jamie or someone working with him checked a box indicating that Spears had dementia.”

#FreeBritney
#BritneySpears

“ Butcher recalled Lynne ( mother) replying that the conservatorship would last only a few months, and that it would be best for Spears to resent Jamie ( father), rather than her, when it was all over.”

Jesus wept.

“Spears spoke with another lawyer, Jon Eardley, who attempted to move the case to federal court. The lawyers for the conservatorship argued that “Britney lacked the capacity to hire Mr. Eardley to file the Notice of Removal on her behalf, and therefore could not have hired him.”

Several sources felt Ingham was loyal to the conservatorship/Jamie, despite nominally representing Spears. Butcher recalled Jamie saying that Ingham reported to him on Spears’s movements and activities. (Ingham did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.)

Eardley filed another declaration, arguing, among other things, that Spears was being denied due process.

“It is obvious that the conservatorship was planned well in advance of its implementation as a tool to influence the custody proceedings in the family law court and for other illicit purposes,”

In another document, he stated that, the last time Spears attempted to call him, her phone was taken away from her, and that the number was disconnected the next day.

#FreeBritney
#BritneySpears

Sources for the above thread are as follows:

hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-n…

vulture.com/2021/06/britne…

newyorker.com/news/american-…