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Britney Spears recounts horrors of conservatorship in new audio clip, deletes it later

Britney Spears recounts horrors of conservatorship in new audio clip, deletes it later

File image of Britney Spears

Days after releasing her new single with Sir Elton John, Britney Spears posted a brutally honest 22-minute long audio clip on her Youtube and Twitter pages detailing the horrors of conservatorship. The clip, however, was deleted later.

The clip contains audio and no video and seems to be a memo that Spears recorded, giving details of her 13 years of being under conservatorship.

While the audio disappeared from Spears' social media pages, several fans have reposted it on various fan accounts on Youtube. In the clip, the singer can be heard giving a background on the court-ordered conservatorship she was put under in 2008. Her father Jamie Spears was named as the only conservator until he was terminated in November 2021.

“So I woke up this morning and I realized that there’s a lot going on in my head that I haven’t really shared with anyone really,” Spears says at the beginning of the clip. The singer stated that she had held back her feelings on conservatorship and not expressed in previous interviews out of embarrassment about what other people would think. “I’m here honestly just to open myself to others and try to shed a light on if anyone out there has ever gone through hardships.”

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Spears, now 40, recounted that conservatorship started when she was 25. “I was extremely young, I remember a lot of my friends texting me and calling me and we were extremely close and they wanted to see me,” Spears said. “But what had happened, honestly, still to this day I don’t know what really I did, but [due to] the punishment of my father I wasn’t able to see anyone.”

“You have to imagine none of it made sense to me. I literally spoke in a British accent to a doctor to prescribe my medication and three days later there was a swat team in my home [with] three helicopters,” says Spears detailing the confusion of the time, adding that her “playing chase with paparazzi,” something she enjoyed, was used as further evidence of erratic behaviour.

On her recollection of the night things began, Spears said, “There were over 200 paparazzi outside my house videotaping me through a window of an ambulance holding me down on a gurney.”

Spears says she believes the conservatorship was “premeditated” and her parents colluded with outside elements. “I know now it was all premeditated and a woman introduced the idea to my dad and my mom, [and] actually helped him follow through and made it all happen.”

“It was all basically set up,” Spears says. “There (were) no drugs in my system, no alcohol, nothing it was pure abuse and I haven’t even really shared even half of it.”

Spears claimed that her father wanted full “control” of her life which he achieved through the conservatorship. “He loved to control everything I did. I remember the first day he said I’m Britney Spears, and I’m calling the shots, and I’m like alrighty then.”

The singer then details at length the hardships and horrors she had to suffer under the conservatorship. Every movement of hers was watched, there were restrictions on what she could do and not do. “I was never ever able to leave or go anywhere,” she says.

“I was told I was fat every day. I had to go to the gym…. I remember feeling so demoralized and just they made me feel like nothing, Spears reveals. “And I went along with it because I was scared and fearful, I didn’t even really do anything.”

Spears added, “I had to just play this role that everything was okay all the time and I had to go along with it because I knew they could hurt me.”

“It was demoralizing,” Spears recalled. “You also have to understand, it was like 15 years of touring and doing shows. And I’m 30 years old, living under my dad’s rules. And while all of this is going on, my mom’s witnessing this, my brother, my friends — they all go along with it."

The singer revealed she was forced to do tours that she didn't want to and when she tried to push back and refuse to do a certain dance step, her father would always threaten her with more legal action.

“I remember my dad calling me on the phone and I was crying and I was like, ‘Why are you guys doing this? … and I just remember him saying, ‘You have to listen to the doctors, the doctors are going to tell you what to do, I can’t help you now.’ And I remember his last words were ‘now you don’t have to go [to the hospital], but if you don’t go we’re going to go to court and there’ll be a big trial and you’re going to lose. I have way more people on my side than you, you don’t even have a lawyer.'”

Spears says that her treatment under the conservatorship was such that she “kind of stopped believing in God at that time,” and wonders how her family and all the enablers were able to “get away with it."

The singer also called out her sister and mother for not speaking up even though her fans had started the #FreeBritney movement.

“The whole thing that made it really confusing for me is these people are on the street fighting for me, but my sister and my mother aren’t doing anything,” Spears says. “To me, it was like they secretly honestly liked me being the bad one — like I was messed up, and they kind of just liked it that way. Otherwise, why weren’t they outside my doorstep, saying, ‘Baby girl, get in the car. Let’s go.’ I think that’s the main thing that hurt me.”

Spears lays the blame for her trauma on her family. “They literally killed me. They threw me away. That’s what I felt like my family threw me away."

She singled out her mother, Lynn Spears, who she feels could have gotten her lawyer to fight for her to end the conservatorship immediately but never did.

“I’m honestly more angry at my mom because I heard when reporters would call her at the time and ask questions of what was going on she would…hide in the house and she wouldn’t speak up,” says Spears.

“It was always like, ‘I don’t know what to say I just don’t want to say the wrong thing, we’re praying for her.’ I feel like she could have gotten me a lawyer in literally two seconds.”

Spears ends the clip by explaining why she made it. “I’m sharing this because I want people to know I’m only human. I do feel victimized after these experiences and how can I mend this if I don’t talk about it?”

She added, “If you’re a weird introvert oddball like me who feels alone a lot of the time, and you needed to hear a story like this today, so you don’t feel alone, know that my life has been far from easy and you’re not alone."

The court lifted Britney's conservatorship in 2021. The singer got married to beau Sam Asghari earlier this year.

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Shomini Sen

Shomini has written on entertainment and lifestyle for most of her career. Having watched innumerable Bollywood potboilers of the 1990s, writing for cinema came as an easy option t...Read More