What We Learned About Britney Spears’s Conservatorship, in Her Own Words

In her memoir, The Woman in Me, out today, Britney Spears spares no details when it comes to her childhood growing up in Louisiana in a dysfunctional home, including the trauma of living with an alcoholic father and watching her mother nearly bleed to death from a postpartum hemorrhage. Her devastating public breakup with her first love, Justin Timberlake, became the second-toughest thing she endures, but her thoughts take an even darker turn halfway through the memoir when she starts describing the psychological abuse she suffered for years under her oppressive conservatorship. With her every move monitored for 13 years, Spears recounts the restrictions put on her from 2008 to 2021, when the keys to her livelihood were handed over to her father, Jamie Spears. Many details of the conservatorship have already been revealed in previous documentaries (not in her own words), a courtroom testimony (in her own words), and sporadic Instagram posts (in her own words but often deleted or edited). How much more is there, really, for her to say about the darkest time in her life? Now, in her own words, here is what stood out from Spears’s tell-all.

As of writing, Spears is still not sure why she was allowed to be put into a conservatorship.

“I remained shocked that the state of California would let a man like my father — an alcoholic, someone who’d declared bankruptcy, who’d failed in business, who terrified me as a little girl — control me after all my accomplishments and everything I had done.�

Spears said she had only learned her family got a judge to sign off on a conservatorship after she had been taken to the hospital against her will. She later tried to get her court-appointed lawyer to help but said he didn’t seem eager to fight for her rights or even to help her understand what was going on.

Spears filmed How I Met Your Mother a few weeks into her conservatorship. 

“The conservatorship was created supposedly because I was incapable of doing anything — feeding myself, spending my own money, being a mother, anything. So why was it that a few weeks later, they had me shoot an episode of How I Met Your Mother and then sent me out on a grueling tour?�

After appearing on the TV show, Spears was dispatched on the worldwide Circus tour, which grossed $130 million, and later signed on to be a coach on The Voice for reportedly $15 million. She says she felt that her father saw her only purpose as helping with the family’s cash flow.

Spears says anyone who wanted to date her had to undergo a background check, sign an NDA, and consent to a blood test.

“Before a date, Robin [Greenhill] would tell the man my medical and sexual history,� Spears writes. “To be clear, this was before the first date.�

She says her phone had parental controls on it and later learned that all her text messages and calls, including those with her boyfriend and lawyer, were monitored.

Because everything was monitored, Spears tried to smuggle cell phones and fight back.

“I felt scared,� she says. “I’ll be honest, I was fucking miserable.�

She says she went into “autopilot� and did what she was told in order to spend time with her children.

Her father called her “fat� and regulated what she ate. 

“For two years, I ate almost nothing but chicken and canned vegetables,� Spears says.

She says she often begged for hamburgers, French fries, or ice cream but was told by staff that wasn’t allowed.

Spears’s father forced her to announce the Domination residency.

Things finally came to a head in 2018 — after having done hundreds of Vegas shows and a tour for the Glory album — when she was informed that she needed to start rehearsing for her next Vegas residency. She told her team for months that she didn’t want to do the show. “I’d learn soon, because once I made it clear that I wasn’t going to keep doing Vegas, my family made me disappear,� she writes.

Spears says her father arranged a huge press event in Vegas and pressured her to announce the residency, but instead she walked past Mario Lopez and the cameras, got into her waiting SUV, and left.

Spears says her father forced her to then go to a $60,000 rehab facility, threatening to take her to court if she refused. 

“We will make you look like a fucking idiot, and trust me, you will not win,� Spears says her father told her.

Before her father informed her that she would be going to a new rehab facility, a doctor told her that he’d heard she was giving everyone a hard time. Throughout the memoir, Spears talks about being forced to go to rehab after taking “over-the-counter energy supplements� to help with performing.

Spears says that she learned of the Free Britney movement from a nurse at the rehab facility.

“Seeing them marching in the streets, chanting ‘Free Britney!’ — that was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my life,� she writes.

At the time, it was publicly announced that Spears was canceling her Domination Vegas residency and taking an indefinite hiatus to help her father recover from an illness. She says the truth was that she had been locked in a facility against her will for months. She was shocked when a nurse showed her on the computer that fans were trying to figure out where she was and if she was okay.

She called 911 the night before the court hearing, where she spoke to report her father for conservatorship abuse. 

“I had stayed quiet publicly about the whole thing, but I was praying in my head for it to end,� Spears writes.

She says that during the pandemic, she began calling her court-appointed attorney of 13 years, Samuel Ingham — who she says “had never been much help� — twice a week to figure out her options. She says she felt even more emboldened when Kevin Federline filed a police report for a restraining order against Jamie regarding an altercation he had with their then-13-year-old son, Sean Preston.

Spears says she was scared when she finally addressed the judge on June 23, 2021, demanding her freedom. 

“I deserve to have the same rights as anybody does, by having a child, a family, any of those things, and more so,� Spears says.

Subsequently, she hired Mathew Rosengart, a former federal prosecutor, who told her he was appalled that she had been denied her own lawyer for so long. Rosengart immediately set out to dismantle the conservatorship.

Spears doesn’t think her family truly understands the lasting damage the conservatorship has done to her.

“Still, I couldn’t believe it when he called as soon as he came out of the court hearing and told me it was done,� Spears writes of Rosengart removing her father as a conservator and ending the conservatorship completely. “I was free.�

Because of the residual anger against her family, Spears says she now suffers from debilitating migraines.