Suspense is building ahead of Britney Spears’ planned audience Wednesday with the judge overseeing her strict, court-ordered conservatorship.
What will she ask for? What’s the rush after 13 years? Is she really as happy as she claims to be in her Instagram posts?
While the hearing will almost certainly be conducted out of the earshot of media and fans, her lawyer said in April that Spears requested it on an “expedited” basis.
The last-known time Spears attended a hearing in person was 2019. Since then, the “Toxic” singer has vowed she’ll boycott all stage performances until her dad Jamie Spears is removed from any involvement in her $60 million estate.
In an Instagram post Thursday, the 39-year-old broached the subject again while seeming to assure fans she’s not in need of any emergency rescue.
“Am I ready to take the stage again? Am I gonna take the stage again? Will I ever take the stage again?” she asked during one of her impromptu Q&A videos.
“I have no idea. I’m having fun right now. I’m in a transition in my life, and I’m enjoying myself,” she said.
Conservatorships are put in place when judges find that adults have such diminished mental capacity that they require a family member or professional to step in to make financial, medical and other important decisions for them.
Called guardianships in some states, conservatorships have been granted over other high-profile Hollywood celebrities including Mickey Rooney, Amanda Bynes and, more recently, “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” husband Tom Girardi.
In Spears’ case, her two-part conservatorship was put in place after a series of high-profile mental health crises in 2007 and 2008 culminated with an involuntary hospitalization. It includes one arm that oversees her security, medical care and visitation with her two minor sons and another that controls her vast fortune.
Her dad formerly controlled both arms, but he’s since been replaced by care manager Jodi Montgomery on the personal side. On the financial side, he recently was ordered to share duties with Bessemer Trust, a wealth management firm selected by his daughter.
“Mr. Spears has performed his job well. This is not an opinion; he has taken the estate from being in debt and facing tens of millions of dollars of lawsuits to a current value of well over $60 million,” Jamie’s lawyers said in a court filing last year.
They claimed Jamie has worked “hard with a team of professionals to restore (Britney) to good health, reunite her with her children, and revive her career.”
A conservatorship can always be dissolved by the court against a petitioner’s wishes, but in those cases, it’s up to the conservatee to prove their competence, and after years of intense and often adverse scrutiny, that can be difficult.
“A lot of what courts go by is history,” New York lawyer Carolyn Reinach Wolf, an expert in conservatorships, told the Daily News. “If someone has acted responsibly and done well (as a conservator), that could be compelling enough to make the court say, ‘What’s the problem here? Why change? Let’s keep things as they are because they’re working.’”
Then again, courts have ongoing obligations to conservatees as well, Wolf said.
“The courts are required to act in the best interest of the incapacitated person while considering what the least-restrictive alternative is,” she explained. “If (Spears’) preference is not to have her dad be conservator and have someone else take that role, maybe someone she chooses, that’s the less-restrictive alternative in my mind, and the court should respect that.”
Wolf said in her opinion, parents should be parents, not their kids’ conservators.
“And when you’re talking about younger people with mental health issues, large sums of money and even fame in this case, it’s really not healthy to have a family member in charge of all that,” she said.
Parental involvement aside, she doesn’t think the duration of Spears’ conservatorship is necessarily a cause for concern.
“There is a certain comfort level – especially in situations like this when someone is so at-risk of people taking advantage of them – to having a court overseeing your affairs, helping to manage and care for you. But it works better when it’s someone you trust and can engage with in a positive way. My guess is she might be able to do even better than she’s doing now if you take the fight and struggle out of who is the conservator,” Wolf said.
Jamie Spears may have been calling the shots when Spears returned to the stage for her successful Las Vegas residency, regained regular visitation with her two sons and started a long-term relationship with boyfriend Sam Asghari, but even Asghari has gone on record saying he doesn’t approve of Jamie’s oversight.
“Now it’s important for people to understand that I have zero respect for someone trying to control our relationship and constantly throwing obstacles in our way,” Asghari wrote on Instagram last February.
Spears’ longstanding conservatorship gained new urgency after the buzzy “Framing Britney Spears” documentary debuted on FX and Hulu earlier this year and reenergized the #FreeBritney movement.
The documentary, which portrays Spears as a victim of an overzealous legal proceeding and financial feeding frenzy, is now part of an Emmy campaign with huge billboards courting a nomination dotted around Los Angeles.
For her part, Spears has said she was rattled by the film.
“I didn’t watch the documentary but from what I did see of it I was embarrassed by the light they put me in,” she said on social media. “I cried for two weeks and well…I still cry sometimes!!!!”
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