In a new account of Britney Spears’s conservatorship for The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino and Rowan Farrow reported new details of Spears’s ongoing fight.
Tolentino and Farrow reported one detail in particular about the night before Spears’s June 23 testimony: Per someone close to Spears and to Ventura County law enforcement, the pop star called 911 to report herself as a victim of abuse from her own conservatorship.
The New Yorker notes: “Emergency calls in California are generally accessible to the public, but the county, citing an ongoing investigation, sealed the records of Spears’s call.”
Tolentino and Farrow report that members of Spears’s team were afraid of what she would say in the testimony and that they asked for the transcript of her testimony to be sealed. As we know, Spears called into the hearing. The New Yorker reports she urged for what she had to say to be made public.
“Somebody’s done a good job at exploiting my life,” she said, adding, “I feel like it should be an open-court hearing—they should listen and hear what I have to say.”
During her testimony, Spears was clear and direct about how she felt, The New Yorker states.
“The people who did this to me should not get away,” Spears said. Addressing the judge directly, she added, “Ma’am, my dad, and anyone involved in this conservatorship, and my management, who played a huge role in punishing me when I said no—Ma’am, they should be in jail.”
As Lauren Puckett-Pope reported for ELLE.com, Spears’s conservatorship is complicated. Another startling detail in this testimony was the 39-year-old star’s claim that she was forced to use contraception she did not want.
“I have an [IUD] inside my body right now, but I wanna get pregnant. I want it taken out so I can 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,” she testified.
Apparently, this is legal:
Family law attorney David A. Esquibias, who represents celebrity Amanda Bynes, told People:
“As invasive as it sounds, a conservatee can be told, ‘You have to be on birth control.’ The idea is to protect the conservatee because the conservatee is unable to care for herself while pregnant or during childbirth.”
As experts told The New York Times, situations like this do not usually involve an adult who is able to care for herself.
Hilary Weaver
Hilary Weaver is a freelance writer based in New York who writes about politics, queer issues, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, and every woman the Queen has ever made a dame.
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