How Britney Spears, betrayed by family, took back control of her life

Britney’s story will break your heart even if you’ve been following the tragedy of her life — her struggles with mental health and the media circus around her divorces, her children, and her love interests — closely. It will also make you angry at the extent of insidious damage patriarchy, and a system steeped in it, can do to a woman even if she happens to be a big star, with legions of admirers around the world. And to think that it all happens in a supposedly liberated society, in the land of freedom, only underscores the fact that a woman remains vulnerable no matter which part of the world she lives in; the greed, malevolence, and monstrosity of men can lay waste to the life and dreams of any woman, anywhere. Even if it happens to be California, Los Angeles, a glitzy city under the world’s glare.

The story of her life

It’s a dark and gothic tale in which a candid and unsparing Britney, the girl from the South with dreams in her eyes, lets us in on her life — from her being born in Mississippi and raised in a dysfunctional family in Kentwood, Louisiana, to her rise to stardom, from her relationships and marriages to the Kafkaesque nightmare of the legal conservatorship since 2008, an arrangement orchestrated by her father, in collusion with her mother, sister and others, under which she lost control of her own life, and forced to let Jamie manage her finances, her estate, and her day-to-day activities. Their excuse: she was not stable enough to manage her own affairs.

When Britney was a little girl, she would walk for hours alone in the silent woods behind her little brick house, singing songs, taking a break from doing the family laundry and ironing, and the everyday fights between her mother and her alcoholic father: “Outside wasn’t necessarily heaven, either, but it was my world. Call it heaven or hell, it was mine.” Lying down in the rock garden of her neighbours, she would tell herself that she could make her own way in life. Singing was her refuge, too: “In the Bible it says your tongue is your sword. My tongue and my swords were me singing.” To her, singing bridged reality and fantasy; ‘the world I was living in and the world that I desperately wanted to inhabit. It took her into ‘the presence of the divine’. 

Early on, we are told about the culture of systemic silencing of women in families, especially in the South: “Disagreeing with a parent was never permitted in my house. No matter how bad it got, there was an understanding to stay mute, and if I didn’t, there were consequences.” Tragedy ran in the family. Her grandfather, June Spears Sr, was abusive. A sports fanatic, he would force her father to exercise long past exhaustion. When her grandmother, Emma Jean Spears, lost their three-day-old baby, he sent her to a horrible asylum in Southeast Louisiana, and put on lithium. Eight years after losing her son, Jean shot herself — at the age of 31 in 1966 — with a shotgun on the infant’s grave. Britney’s father was 13 at the time. “I know that trauma is part of why my father was how he was with my siblings and me; why, for him, nothing was ever good enough,” she writes about her father, who would drink ‘till he couldn’t think anymore.’ Not only would he be extremely mean to his children, he’d also disappear for days on end. Lost in drinking Jamie, a welder at oil refineries, also suffered financial setbacks, causing distress to his family.

Lilian ‘Lilly’ Portell, Britney’s maternal grandmother, came from a sophisticated family in London. She had met Barney Bridges, an American soldier who drove the generals, and Britney’s future grandfather, during World War II. After Bridges brought her to the Louisiana countryside, she spent her life cooking and cleaning and milking cows, missing the vibrant, music-filled life of London — he wouldn’t let her go fearing she would not come back — until the day she died.

Britney writes, with great candour, about the fluctuating fortunes of the family; the accident in which her brother, Bryan, got severely injured and in a full body cast when she was four; taking up gymnastics classes and entering a local dance competition and winning a regional contest at 5; not making it to the All New Mickey Mouse Club, along with Christina Aguilera, and being officially signed by a talent agency in New York at the age of nine; getting offered a job in the off-Broadway musical Ruthless, in which she played a sociopathic child star, Tina Denmark; auditioning for Mickey Mouse Club, again, at 11, her relationship Justin Timberlake, one of the Musketeers, and their messy breakup, which took a toll on her mental health.

The price of stardom

Britney was only 16, when her wildly popular single … Baby One More Time hit stores on October 23, 1998. When the album came out on January 12, 1999, it sold over ten million copies in record time. Britney debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart in the US — the first woman to debut with a number one single and album at the same time. Britney Spears had arrived. But stardom came with a price. At the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards, where she sang the Rolling Stones number, (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, and Oops!... I Did it Again…, from her second studio album of the same name, in glittery bikini top and tight pants, with her wavy locks flowing down, Britney discovered the dark side of being in the public eye. MTV made her sit in front of a monitor, making her listen to random people saying random things about her, and the host pestering her with a response to someone on the street alleging that Britney was corrupting America’s youth with her skimpy clothes.

If you find this disgusting, that was not enough. Many of her critics in the audience would be older men, leering at her as if she were some kind of a ‘Lolita fantasy’. She laments: ‘No one could seem to think of me as both sexy and capable, or talented and hot. If I was sexy, they seemed to think I must be stupid. If I was hot, I couldn’t possibly be talented.’ She went steady with Timberlake for a while; Britney was living her dream, and she didn’t want to rock the boat. She had become pregnant, but was asked to abort even though she could have never chosen this for herself. Soon, things soured between them when Timberlake was working on his first solo album, Justified. Britney writes that not only did he cash in on their relationship to promote his album, he also tried to play the victim through some tracks in the album; his song, Cry Me A River, in which a woman who resembles Britney cheats on him, and he wanders in the rain, filled with sadness. It provided the grist to the newsmill; Britney was described as “the harlot who had broken the heart of America’s golden boy.” She writes: “There’s always been more leeway in Hollywood for men than for women. And I see how men are encouraged to talk trash about women in order to become famous and powerful. But I was shattered.”

Reeling from abortion and a terrible breakup, Britney admits to not having handled things well. She felt isolated, awkward. And the paps followed her wherever she went, invading her privacy to mint money off her misery. But she was determined to tell her version of the story one day. It was during this surreal time that Madonna lent her a shoulder to cry, and the two collaborated, too. And then came Kevin Federline, whom she married and had two sons (Sean Peterson and Jayden James) with. But he, too, turned out to be no different, and they parted ways on a chaotic note. A new mother, as she struggled with perinatal depression, sadness, anxiety and fatigue, all the American media could think of was somehow take pictures of the babies, with some even scaling the walls to shoot through windows.

The big betrayal

With life tearing at her from several directions, Britney continued to spiral down an uneasy path. She was vilified yet again after she filed for divorce with an uncaring Kevin, who could not care less, and was far from being a supportive husband, always away when Britney needed her the most; the custody battle was even more acrimonious than the divorce. In his bid for full custody of Peterson and James, he planted a narrative that Britney was ‘out of control’ and should not be trusted with the kids. Young and naïve at the time, Britney writes that she never learned how to play the game: “Looking back, I think that both Justin and Kevin were very clever. They knew what they were doing, and I played right into it.”

The real betrayal, however, came from her family. Specifically, her father. Out of mind with grief, she got her head shaved, which made matters worse. Her own mother would not talk to her because she found her daughter ‘ugly.’ Her father said: “You’re a disgrace.” termed her disgrace With her sons in custody of Kevin, she flailed about, and lost it, many times over: “I felt like I was living on the edge of a cliff ... .I felt like no one had my back. Kevin took my world away from me. He knocked the breath out of me. And my family did not hold me.” As things fell apart for Britney, her parents got back together in 2010, eight years after their divorce. When she was going through hell, her mother was pushing her memoir in the media, sharing the mistakes of her daughter on television.

Britney lost her freedom in 2008 when her father, with the help of the court, established two forms of conservatorship: of the person, and of the estate. It meant that Jamie controlled her finances — tens of millions of dollars — as well as her every move: where she went, what she ate, and even when she went to the loo. Besides her personal freedom, she lost creative control over her work, and her sassiness. She did not have a say in planning her tours, or tweaking her tracks. She didn’t feel able to reach the sense of freedom that she had before. “And that’s what we have as artists — that freedom is who we are and what we do. I wasn’t free under the conservatorship. I wanted to be a woman in the world. Under the conservatorship, I wasn’t able to be a woman at all.”

Breathing the air of freedom

For the longest time, Britney remained shocked that the state of California would let a man like her father — an alcoholic, someone who’d declared bankruptcy, who’d failed in business, who’d terrified her as a little girl — control her after all she had achieved. She had chosen to go along with the conservatorship for the sake of her sons, but being in it was not just hard, it robbed her of her zest for life: “I knew there was something more inside me, but I felt it dimming every day. Over time, the fire inside me burned out. The light went out of my eyes.”

In the darkness, there was a spark of light. Some of her fans had realised what was happening and they created a campaign: #FreeBritney. She came to know of it when she was at a mental health facility in Beverly Hills, where her father had forced her to go, and where she was put on lithium, which made her sense of time hazy. But she didn’t lose hope. She also realised the need to share more of her life on social media, especially Instagram, where convince her fans that she was “a real person”, still coherent, still sane, and not demented as her own family had proved to the world.

Finally, on the night of June 22, 2021, from her home in California, she called 911 and reported her father for conservatorship abuse. On November 12 of the same year, she told the court over phone: “I want to end this conservatorship without being evaluated. This conservatorship is doing me way more harm than good.” The court subsequently terminated it and Britney breathed the air of freedom, again. “Freedom means being goofy, silly, and having fun on social media. Freedom means taking a break from Instagram without people calling 911. Freedom means being able to make mistakes, and learning from them. Freedom means I don’t have to perform for anyone — onstage or offstage. Freedom means that I get to be as beautifully imperfect as everyone else. And freedom means the ability, and the right, to search for joy, in my own way, on my own terms,” she writes.