![]() What fame and questionable autonomy have done for Britney Spears’ mental health is still up for debate. Even before the conservatorship, questions of control have plagued Britney’s career since the beginning, becoming a star as a minor under the legal authority of her parents. After years on The Mickey Mouse Club as a child, “…Baby One More Time” became an international hit when Britney was just 16 years old. The first thing to acknowledge is how Britney’s career started. If 2007 prompted many to decide that Britney was “crazy,” we should, at the very least, question that narrative–not to prove that she does or doesn’t have a mental illness, but to speculate on if her public struggles actually justified the removal of her rights given what we know of the external factors of her “breakdown.” ![]() I don’t want to speculate on what mental illness Britney has, if she has one at all, but if we’re going to question what warrants such a strict guardianship, we should try to get a clear idea of the circumstances of Britney’s most public struggles. ![]() The popular conclusion is that Britney went “crazy,” and of course people took drastic actions to protect her, but the truth is much more complicated. With such little concrete evidence, I understand why mainstream journalists wouldn’t want to touch this topic with a ten-foot pole, especially as we get into murky territory regarding Britney’s privacy and the way we talk about mental illness (which many stans–not all–in the #FreeBritney fight have not been totally sensitive to) but as Britney’s conservatorship goes on and coverage on her continues referencing it, no mainstream publication has done a deep-dive contextualizing the events that led up to the conservatorship being put in place, despite this information being far more widely available than events post-conservatorship.Įvery explainer piece you read about #FreeBritney and the conservatorship takes the issue of how Britney was placed into one for granted: we all remember 2007, so what else is there to talk about? She shaved her head, got 5150’d, sometimes spoke in bad British accents, and voila: conservatorship. There are so few hard facts to lean on that fans are forced to speculate which can lead to some wild conclusions that cost the rest of the movement credibility. This is why the #FreeBritney movement is somewhat of a mess. We just don’t know what’s been going on, but fans who’ve seen enough to become critical of the situation have tried to connect all the dots for themselves. What’s hard about discussing the life and conservatorship of Britney Spears is that her entire life, especially the last 12 years, has been shrouded in so much mystery that it’s impossible to organize any pieces of it into a reasonable narrative. By 2019, people around her began indicating problems with her team, her own rights to defend herself in court had seemingly been blocked for years, and thousands of people were still making an obscene amount of money off her work, maybe benefiting directly from her captivity. ![]() At the time, we were months into the #FreeBritney movement’s peak* and I was trying to sort through all the bullshit and suspicious activity to explain why Britney’s then 11-year (now 12-year) long conservatorship was concerning: though legally deemed incapable of taking care of herself, and therefore in need of a conservator (a legal guardian) to make all her major life decisions, her career had taken no real breaks since…well ever. Less than a year ago, I published a blog post overviewing the on-going drama surrounding Britney Spears’ conservatorship.
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