Britney Spears: judge to consider requests to terminate conservatorship on Wednesday
Britney Spears’s conservatorship is heading back to court for a high-stakes hearing on Wednesday, in which a judge will consider requests to remove her father as the authority over her estate and to terminate the legal arrangement altogether.
The closely watched hearing comes days after a new documentary alleged that Britney Spears’s father, Jamie Spears, and a security team he hired monitored the singer’s private communications and secretly recorded her interactions in her bedroom, including conversations with her boyfriend and children.
Related: Britney Spears: team says father crossed ‘unfathomable lines’ on surveillance
At the highly anticipated hearing in Los Angeles, Judge Brenda Penny will consider whether to terminate Jamie’s role as conservator of the singer’s estate.
The pop star, whose personal life and finances have been controlled by the controversial legal arrangement for 13 years, has pleaded for the court to remove her father from the arrangement. Her legal team issued a filing this week accusing Jamie of crossing “unfathomable lines” and engaging in “horrifying and unconscionable invasions of his adult daughter’s privacy”.
Lawyers for Jamie have previously said that he would step down “when the time is right”, but have aggressively fought efforts to immediately suspend him.
In a surprising filing earlier this month, Jamie’s lawyers requested that the court instead end the conservatorship entirely, a request the judge will also discuss on Wednesday.
The singer’s lawyer, Mathew Rosengart, in response has accused Jaime of trying “to avoid accountability and justice” and said Spears supported full termination, but that she first wanted her father removed.
The conservatorship requires Spears’s estate to pay for her father’s attorneys and other bills, and Rosengart noted that she has been forced to pay roughly $540,000 for Jamie’s “media matters” as he fights her requests.
Fans traveled from across the country to support Spears in LA on Wednesday, with protesters shutting down the street outside the courthouse for their rally.
“Today could be life-changing for Britney,” said Martino Odeh, 27, who drove up from Phoenix, Arizona. “Britney means the world to us, and I know if we can help her get out of this fraudulent, tragic conservatorship, it would mean the world to her.”
Mona Montgomery, a 79-year-old retired lawyer who arrived hours before the hearing was due to start, said she was glad the public was finally learning about conservatorship abuse: “This information has been kept secret for so many decades.”
Spears has been strongly objecting to the conservatorship for years, records have revealed, but she spoke out publicly for the first time in court in June. She called the arrangement “abusive” and alleged that her father and others controlled intimate details of her personal life, including her birth control, and had forced her to work against her will.
Court records suggested that Spears has also been denied access to her own money, with the conservatorship limiting her to a weekly allowance even while she was earning millions in a Las Vegas residency. Her medical care is currently controlled by a licensed conservator, who has also supported the singer’s request to remove her father.
Fans, organizing under the #FreeBritney movement, have been advocating for the arrangement to end for years. The recent New York Times documentary featured a former employee of Black Box, a security firm hired by her father, who alleged that the company sent infiltrators to investigate the group at their rallies and issued a “threat assessment report” on the fans.
The firm described a prominent organizer, Megan Radford, as a young mother in Oklahoma who was “a high risk due to her creation and sharing of information”, according to the Times. Radford told the Guardian she and others have long suspected they were being monitored considering how much money is at stake.
She said the judge had a duty to immediately remove Jamie, adding that she hoped full termination was imminent: “Public pressure is mounting. I would love for Britney to walk away a free woman.” A lawyer for Black Box said the firm was “proud of their work in keeping Ms Spears safe” and had “always” operated “within professional, ethical and legal bounds”.
“It’s telling that we were deemed ‘high risk’ just for sharing information,” said Kevin Wu, another #FreeBritney advocate. “It makes you really question whether the security team was protecting Britney or protecting the conservatorship.”
Junior Olivas, who helped organize the first fan rally outside court in April 2019, said the reports of surveillance would not intimidate activists: “We’ve gotten this far. We’re not going to let anybody stop us. We’re going to do what we set out to do from the beginning.”
The case has sparked international outrage, and calls for reform to the conservatorship system. On Tuesday, the US Senate held a hearing on “toxic conservatorships”, with Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut playing video testimony of others who had been placed into the arrangements, saying: “There are many others whose names, whose lives, whose stories we often don’t know.”.
Conservatorship is a type of court-appointed guardianship intended for people who can no longer make decisions for themselves, typically people who are older and infirm. But critics have argued that the process can be exploited and have pointed to Spears’s case as an example of such abuse. Spears was placed in the arrangement in 2008 while facing apparent mental health struggles amid intense paparazzi abuse and media scrutiny.
California lawmakers passed a bill this month that gives people in conservatorships the right to choose their own lawyer. Spears was represented by a court-appointed attorney up until July when she was able to hire Rosengart, who has more aggressively challenged the arrangement.