LAWSUITS
LONG-FORM
MUSIC
Inside the Battle for Britney Spears
A grassroots campaign to #FreeBritney from her father’s legal guardianship is exposing a shadow industry that critics say preys on high-net-worth individuals under mental and emotional duress
By
Rex Weiner
December 19, 2019
Shortly after noon on a sunny day last May, reporters staking out the Los Angeles County Superior Court’s Stanley Mosk Courthouse downtown spotted Britney Spears hand in hand with her mother, Lynne, sneaking through a side door and taking pains to avoid the earnest crowd of devoted fans parading outside with #FreeBritney signs.
It was a rare appearance by the Princess of Pop, whose court-appointed attorney, Samuel Ingham III, usually represented her alone in these proceedings. Each year, rules of the probate court require a review of the status of the legally mandated conservatorship headed by her father, Jamie, compelling the parties involved to justify continuing the arrangement that for more than a decade has controlled every aspect of Britney’s business and personal life since her well-documented and very public breakdown in 2008.
For months rumors had been swirling in the press and on Britney fan sites that the 38-year-old mother of two was chafing under the conservatorship, and this bright spring day might see her liberated from its restrictions. After all, hadn’t the gossip website TMZ
reported that Lynne was going to ask the court to relieve her ex-husband Jamie from his role as their daughter’s conservator? For the #Free-Britney movement—a feisty, contentious, and often daffy online community obsessed with releasing the singer from the constraints of her father’s oversight—it seemed the moment of truth was at hand.
With five No. 1 singles, six No. 1 albums, and 150 million records sold worldwide, Britney is ranked by Billboard as the eighth-biggest artist of the first decade of this century; since being placed in the conservatorship, she’s completed four world tours, recorded four albums, and, from December 2013 through December 2017, performed 248 sold-out shows of her concert series, Britney: Piece of Me, at the Zappos Theater at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas. Ranked the fifth-highest-paid female performer in the business, Britney holds the record for an entertainer’s single-night take in Vegas ($1,172,000). All of it adding up to a personal net worth of more than $60 million.
But her booming career screeched to a halt last January. Her concert series, Domination, booked into the Park MGM Theater in Vegas with brisk ticket sales, was abruptly called off. The official explanation for the cancellation: A ruptured colon had sidelined her father. “It’s important to always put your family first,” Britney posted on Instagram. “I had to make the difficult decision to put my full focus and energy on my family at this time. I hope you all can understand.”
It was reported, however, that Britney’s meds, allegedly for a bipolar condition, had either quit working, or she’d stopped taking them— or both—and that she was going on indefinite hiatus. “We all need to take time for a little ‘me time,’ ” she confided on Instagram, adding a smiley face. Fans were not smiley faced to hear her manager, Larry Rudolph, tell TMZ that his client might never work again.
Britney Spears at the announcement of her Vegas residency in October 18, 2018
ETHAN MILLER/GETTY IMAGES
Presiding over a packed courtroom in Probate Department 4 that May afternoon, Judge Brenda Penny—at Ingham’s request the hearing was closed to the public—ordered a medical evaluation of Britney to be delivered September 18. Without opposition from the singer, which would legally have to come through Ingham, the conservatorship that had bound the singer through her 30s remained in force.
As her bodyguards escorted Britney to an SUV idling outside the courtroom, the performer suddenly slipped off her shoes and padded barefoot to the car. To the #FreeBritney contingent gathered on the sidewalk, it was a tiny act of rebellion, a show of independence, or maybe just what a girl from a small Louisiana town does after being on her heels way too long. Within moments, TMZ had posted photos of the barefoot star, pointing to the “bizarre” behavior as yet another sign of her apparent decline.
The fans congregated at the courthouse were dismissed as stans, but they defy easy categorization, and the #FreeBritney movement sees her case as part of a larger issue.
“The media has spent more time worrying about Britney taking her heels off after court yesterday than they have about the very real possibility that her civil rights may have been being violated for the past 11 years,” tweeted Alycia@FitLikeBritney. “Our society is a mess,” she pleaded. Larding their pop idol fandom with woke social commentary, the #FreeBritney activists have charted a surprising course; by tackling Britney’s unusual case, they are shining a light on one of the most urgent issues facing legal professionals and legislatures across the country.
#FreeBritney protestors outside the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in L.A.
CHIARA MATTELLI
Known in most states as a legal guardianship—California uniquely calls it a conservatorship—the court-ordered arrangement that governs Britney’s personal and professional life is applied mostly to the elderly or disabled. It is divided, in legal terms, between a conservatorship of the estate (ongoing business and assets) and a conservatorship of the person (health and well being). Following her notorious head-shaving flip-out and hospitalization in 2008 for undisclosed mental health issues—said to be a bipolar condition requiring medication—Britney is bound by law to follow the direction of attorneys, fiduciaries, and medical consultants, including her 67-year-old father, who constitute both sides of her conservatorship team.
After her spectacular breakdown at the age of 28, any resistance Britney may have offered to the conservatorship was quashed at the beginning of the proceedings, when she attempted to hire veteran estate and trust litigator Adam Streisand to represent her. Despite conflicting medical reports about her mental health, the judge eventually ruled that she was not competent to hire her own attorney, and Ingham was appointed to the post. According to court records, Ingham’s standard hourly rate is as much as $695, but he’s charging Britney a discounted rate of $475. Even so, according to a recent court filing for October 1, 2017, through September 30, 2018, he was paid $331,940.50 for his services—roughly $15,000 a month.
Britney pays the conservatorship more than $1 million a year in legal fees and other expenses, including $15,000 a month to a court-appointed attorney she didn’t choose
Like most people in her situation, Britney is required to cover the costs of her conservatorship. They aren’t cheap. Publicly accessible records meticulously detailing her annual expenses (including more than 80 trips to Target in 2018) reveal that the singer, whose court-mandated accounting shows a net worth north of $60 million, pays more than $1 million a year in fees to her overseers. When the attorney Andrew Wallet, originally appointed in 2008 alongside Jamie Spears as coconservator, desired a raise in 2018 (claiming he had been instrumental in boosting Britney’s assets by $20 million), he petitioned the court to be paid $426,000 annually. Despite getting the raise, Wallet resigned last year, with some speculating that he’d fallen out with Spears pére.
Wallet “didn’t resign because he didn’t like the color of money,” Streisand says today, acknowledging the appetite of professional fiduciaries for high-net-worth conservatorships. For Wallet that has included the much-discussed case of former Warner Bros. Studio boss Terry Semel, whose compensation from his last post, a six-year run as CEO of Yahoo before succumbing to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, was estimated at a half billion dollars. When Semel’s second wife, Jane, relocated the former executive in 2016 from the family’s Bel Air estate to a residence at the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement facility in Woodland Hills, she was sued by his first wife and his son Eric. Eric charged that his father was unhappy in what some regard as “the old actors’ home,” that he was isolated, denied adequate health care, and that the MPTF facility failed to meet the mogul’s usual standard of living. Acting as the son’s lawyer, Streisand pushed the court to appoint an independent conservator, and Wallet was given the temporary post. But the Semel clan reached a confidential agreement before things went further; the 76-year-old former studio head continues to reside in a two-room suite at the Stark Villas on the MPTF campus, according to reports, along with residents such as singer Helen Reddy, who performed at the 2019 MPTF fundraiser. For the single week he served as Semel’s temporary conservator, Wallet was paid $5,100 by the family trust. Meanwhile, Wallet’s website continues to advertise him as “formerly coconservator of the estate of Britney Jean Spears.”
It is this sort of fraught legal maneuvering that the #FreeBritney faithful are convinced is constraining a demonstrably competent entertainer. “We want the conservatorship to end,” said Babs Gray, a stand-up comic and fan of Britney’s since childhood. Pursuing that goal, she and Tess Barker, her partner in the Lady to Lady comedy podcast, have become #FreeBritney’s ringleaders thanks to Britney’s Gram, the popular podcast Gray and Barker launched as a sideline in 2014. Each episode presents the duo riffing on the singer’s whimsical and, often enough, enigmatic Instagram posts. The project started as a lark, Gray told me, “but once we got that voicemail, it took a darker turn.”
The voicemail in question was left for them in April 2019 by a listener who claimed to be a former paralegal with one of the law firms overseeing Britney’s business interests. The putative whistle-blower’s tensely worded message questioned the validity of the conservatorship, alleged that Britney was resisting her overseers, and she had been forcibly medicated and committed against her will to a mental ward for a much longer period than had been publicly disclosed. “That confirmed our worst fears,” said Junior Olivas, a 32-year-old #FreeBritney rally regular from Highland Park, who is among the podcast’s listeners. “We know she wants out of this.”
“It’s no secret that Britney hasn’t been at the same level since her notorious meltdown,” said Kevin Wu, a 35-year-old data analyst who lives in Hollywood. Wu said he saw Britney’s Piece of Meshow in Vegas in 2013, and “I felt she was going through the motions, and it was sad.” The voicemail message on the podcast “confirmed to me that the conservatorship is the reason she couldn’t return to the level she’s had before—not because of mental issues but because she didn’t have control—personal and creative,” Wu added.
Britney strapped to a gurney after barricading herself and her sons inside her L.A. home
after a 2008 custody hearing
Authentic or not—Gray and Barker said they verified the whistle-blower’s identity, but wouldn’t say exactly how—the anonymous tip galvanized fans, and the #FreeBritney army hit the streets in force for the May 10 rally at the singer’s conservatorship hearing. Resolving to regroup at the courthouse September 18—a much more critical hearing because the expert report evaluating her mental health was due to be delivered—fans online nurtured the hope that perhaps the conservatorship would be dissolved.
“I’ve been trying to find out who that so-called paralegal is,” said an attorney who serves the Spears management team, speaking on the condition that he remain unidentified. He said he highly doubts that the informant exists. “These fans don’t understand anything about the law or conservatorships, and, frankly, they’re going a little crazy with these conspiracy theories. There are some unstable people out there. We’ve been getting threats.”
Britney herself sent the same message on Instagram shortly after the Britney’s Gram voicemail episode April 23, 2019, pleading with fans, “things that are being said have just gotten out of control!!! Wow!!! There’s rumors, death threats to my family and my team, and just so many crazy things being said. I am trying to take a moment for myself, but everything that’s happening is just making it harder for me. Don’t believe everything you read and hear.”
But was Britney, in fact, posting this message herself or … ?
In the era of Fake News, rampant disinformation, and wild conspiracy theories, the idea that one of the world’s most famous entertainers could legally be held against her will by a nefarious team, including her father, those overseers taking over her social media to ward off critics and enriching themselves at her expense, seems like yet another outlandish fantasy. But that is more or less the underlying theory held by many of the fans mobilizing online—Britney has 56 million Twitter followers and 23 million on Instagram—who commiserate, conspire, collude, bicker, and banter using the frequently trending #FreeBritney handle.
Questioning the “