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During her testimony before a Los Angeles judge on Wednesday, Britney Spears was finally able to reveal some of the unusual situations she has had to go through over the years under her father’s legal guardianship.
According to the pop star, the legal team appointed by her father has forced her to use contraceptive methods to prevent her desire to have a third child, forced her to give concerts against her will and is restricted from having her own money, among other things, exercising an abusive and exploitative control over her.
Britney Spears asked during the hearing for an end to the legal guardianship exercised by her father, James Parnell Spears, who holds, since 2008, almost unlimited power not only over her finances and multimillion-dollar estate, but also over almost any aspect of her life.
“I have a IUD inside of myself right now so I don’t get pregnant. I wanted to take the IUD out so I could start trying to have another baby. But this so called team won’t let me go to the doctor to take it out because they don’t want me to have any more children. So basically, this conservatorship is doing me way more harm than good,” Britney Spears complained bitterly.
“I’m tired of feeling alone. I deserve to have the same rights as anybody does, by having a child, a family, any of those things, and more so.”
In her heartbreaking testimony, the singer went so far as to confess to having “kneeled and thanked God” for the death of her psychiatrist in 2019, whom she noted was “100 percent abusive” to her during her therapy.
“It’s not okay to force me to do anything I don’t want to do by law,” she said. Britney Spears claimed that “I should be able to sue them for threatening me and saying if I don’t go and do these meetings twice a week, we can we can’t let you have your money and go to Maui on your vacations.”
Spears also recounted before the judge that she was forced by this team to perform on a concert tour of Las Vegas, a job that was really hard work. She explained that she always took her job very seriously, and that she ran her show in Las Vegas for years, creating and rehearsing choreography with 16 dancers.
Despite the fact that according to her there are “tons of videos” of her rehearsals, her tutors accused her of not trying hard, simply because she refused to do a dance move in a particular way.
According to Spears, upon her refusal of that particular dance move, the team called her therapist accusing her of being uncooperative and not taking her medication, at which point he forced her to start taking lithium.
“Lithium is a very, very strong medication and completely different than what I was used to. You can become mentally challenged if you take too much, if you use it more than five months,” she said.
“Ma’am, I’m not here to be anyone’s slave. I can say no to a dance move,” Britney Spears told the judge.
“My doctor had me on six different nurses come to my home, stay with me to monitor me on this new medication, which I never wanted to be on to begin with. There were six different nurses in my home and they wouldn’t let me get in my car to go anywhere for a month.”
Britney Spears said her family “not do a goddamn thing” about the lithium, and that even her father “was all for it,” who she claimed “loved the control” he had over her. “Anything that happened to me had to be approved by my dad … he loved the control to hurt his own daughter 100,000%. He loved it,” Spears confessed.
The pop star also lashed out at the state of California during her testimony, which she accused of allowing her guardianship to continue, despite having documented the “shock” and “trauma” she has suffered.
“I don’t [know] how the state of California can have all this written in the court documents from the time I showed up and do absolutely nothing — [they] just hired, with my money, another person to keep my dad on board,” Spears alleged in court.
Spears asked the court that, in addition to ending her guardianship, she would like to be granted the opportunity to give an interview about what happened and be able to give the names of the people who made her suffer.
“also would like to be able to share my story with the world, and what they did to me, instead of it being a hush-hush secret to benefit all of them. I’ve been so angry and I cry every day, it concerns me, I’m told I’m not allowed to expose the people who did this to me,” Spears explained.
Britney Spears support movement accused of conspiracy theory
The apparent injustice of the legal guardianship over Britney Spears has generated a whole movement of support for the pop star by her fans, under the hashtag #FreeBritney, to which more people are joining, and even other celebrities like her ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake, Rose McGowan, or Senator Ted Cruz.
The #FreeBritney movement emerged a few years ago on the internet and was accused of being a conspiracy theory. However, as has happened in other cases, what at first tried to be ridiculed, has turned out to be real.
The truth is that in 2008, since Britney Spears was hospitalized under the pretext of her mental health, her father and a team of lawyers have been exercising a guardianship that, while legal, is apparently abusive and illegitimate.
After more than a decade in which her father has apparently been trying to hide this situation by accusing those who tried to help Britney Spears of being “conspiratorial”, thanks to the tenacity and insistence of these fans, Britney has finally been able to reveal her story to the world.
Ignacio Manuel García Medina, Business Management teacher. Artist and lecturer specialized in Popular Culture for various platforms. Presenter of the program "Pop Libertario" for the Juan de Mariana Institute. Lives in the Canary Islands, Spain // Ignacio M. García Medina es profesor de Gestión de Empresas. Es miembro del Instituto Juan de Mariana y conferenciante especializado en Cultura Popular e ideas de la Libertad.
Social Networks: @ignaciomgm