Inside the broken world of Britney Spears

Britney Spears was a platinum hitmaker, America’s golden girl. Now she navigates freedom amid isolation and scrutiny. Photo / Axelle, Bauer-Griffin, FilmMagic

November 12, 2021, was independence day for Britney Spears. Fans of the singer gathered in their hundreds outside a Los Angeles courthouse and cheered as her 13-year conservatorship – a controversial legal arrangement that gave her father, James “Jamie” Spears, complete control over her estate and personal life – was finally overturned.

Spears, who did not attend court that day, celebrated with what she called her “first glass of champagne”. After years as a pop star, it surely could not have been her first. But it was a poignant image nonetheless: At 39 years old, she seemed more childlike than she did at 16, overawed by the world, stuck in a state of arrested development. She has said that the conservatorship infantilised her, turning her into what she called a “child-robot”. On her 40th birthday, less than a month after it was lifted, she joked: “I’m not turning 40 … I’m turning 4.”

As a young pop star, Britney Spears had the world at her feet. Photo / Getty Images

For nearly 14 years, Spears’ conservators (her father, and a lawyer named Andrew Wallet) had made every decision on her behalf. The conservatorship was triggered by a series of very public mental health crises in 2007 and 2008. Jamie, whom she describes as an “alcoholic, someone who’s declared bankruptcy … who’d terrified me as a little girl”, controlled every aspect of her day-to-day life. In her 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me, she wrote: “He knew what I ate; he even knew when I would go to the bathroom.”

He is alleged to have said: “I’m Britney Spears now,” when the conservatorship came into force. After a years-long struggle, the world celebrated the fact that Britney was finally free to be Britney again.

That was five years ago, and freedom has not been straightforward for America’s pop princess. Her fans certainly had high hopes for this next chapter, even if her former inner circle feared that she could not cope.

While she spent more than a decade effectively imprisoned in the conservatorship, she has spent the time since it was lifted in self-imposed isolation. She lives, seemingly alone and paranoid, in a sprawling Italianate villa in the affluent Thousand Oaks area of California that she purchased in 2015 for US$7.4 million ($12.6m). The neighbourhood is particularly popular with celebrities, known for its privacy and gated communities; former residents include Ellen DeGeneres, Mickey Rooney, Kurt Russell, Sophia Loren and Marilyn Monroe. She is estranged from her family, has said she struggles to maintain friendships and, until recently, did not regularly see her sons, Sean, 20, and Jayden, 19. (Happily, according to reports from earlier this year, they have been spending time together.)

Kevin Federline and Britney Spears. Photo / Getty Images

Eagle-eyed social media users on online forums designed to criticise Spears have noticed that, over this period, she has had at least six pets, which appear briefly on her social media feed then are never seen again. In some clips, there is dog faeces visible on the floor of her home.

She posts erratically on Instagram, often filming clips of herself barely clothed, twirling and dancing with smudged eye makeup and a vacant stare. Sometimes she posts pictures of herself completely nude. She has defended this as an act of emancipation; a woman reclaiming her image and sexuality after years of being hounded by paparazzi and controlled by malevolent family members (often the subject of diatribes that she posts online). “When you’ve been sexualised your whole life, it feels good to be in complete control of the wardrobe and the camera,” she wrote in her memoir.

Onlookers, however, have seen it as a cry for help. In one post from September 2023, she is brandishing two kitchen knives (which she said were fake). She also frequently films videos of herself dancing in a five-star resort in Cabo, Mexico. Frequent luxury holidays hardly seem like a hardship, but she cuts an unmistakably lonely figure.

“We don’t know who is working for her, or who might be working against her – we don’t have the full picture,” says Kat Tenbarge, a US journalist who covered the #FreeBritney movement and the end of Spears’ conservatorship. “One thing I think is true is that she seems very isolated. And I suspect that given what has happened to her, she probably struggles to trust people, and so I think has a very isolated lifestyle.”

Looking back to 2021, it seemed that things were finally looking up. Just before the conservatorship was terminated, Spears announced her engagement to her long-time boyfriend, Sam Asghari, a model and actor 12 years her junior, whom she met on the set of one of her music videos. Asghari and Spears married at home in 2022. Her parents and siblings weren’t invited, and her sons chose not to attend, but celebrity guests included Paris Hilton, Donatella Versace, Madonna and fellow former child stars Drew Barrymore and Selena Gomez. Then, in August that year, she released her first music since 2016, a duet with Elton John called Hold Me Closer. She recorded her vocals in the Beverly Hills home studio of producer Andrew Watt in less than two hours while on her honeymoon.

Sadly, it was short-lived. Asghari filed for divorce just over a year later, citing “irreconcilable differences”. Now, Spears is rarely seen in public and, earlier this year, said she would never perform again in the US. In February this year, she sold her entire music catalogue to a publisher called Primary Wave for a reported sum of around US$200m, a move that seemed to signal her exit from the music industry for good.

On the increasingly rare occasions she has been photographed out and about – usually at restaurants or wine bars in California – she has behaved strangely. In January 2023, she was reportedly seen talking to herself in a Los Angeles restaurant after she became upset by a patron filming her without her consent. She refuted this account with a series of peculiar posts on Instagram, which included a video of her dancing to I Touch Myself by Divinyls while giving the camera the middle finger. Then, in 2024, she was photographed looking dishevelled and confused in her pyjamas outside the Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood after an argument with her on-again-off-again boyfriend Paul Richard Soliz (they separated for good in 2025).

In another incident in October that year, she was filmed swerving while driving home from a Mexican restaurant – footage which she claimed was of a “lookalike”. The police have been called to Spears’ home some 14 times in the past two years, according to reports in the California Post, some for wellbeing checks, some for alleged trespassing and security alarms, and one logged as “subject disturbing”. The latest setback was her March arrest on suspicion of driving under the influence. She has also been in a rehab for substance abuse, reportedly at the behest of her sons.

The Free Britney campaigned sought an end to the conservatorship managed by her father, Jamie Spears. Photo / Getty Images

The 2025 publication of her ex-husband Kevin Federline’s tell-all memoir, You Thought You Knew, was another blow. In it, he accused Spears of drinking while she was pregnant, using cocaine while she was breastfeeding, and scaring their two sons when they were teenagers (including a story that she appeared in their doorway while they slept, holding a knife).

Although they divorced before the conservatorship was put into place, Federline described it as a “lifeline” in the early days, and said that Spears was in no place to manage her own affairs. “The truth is, this situation with Britney feels like it’s racing toward something irreversible,” he wrote. “From where I sit, the clock is ticking, and we’re getting close to the 11th hour.” Spears disputed these claims, calling them “extremely hurtful and exhausting”, and accused Federline of profiting off her as she had stopped paying child support. She has previously denied that she has an issue with substance abuse.

Although she has said on Instagram that she no longer has a management team, there is one person who has stuck by her side: Cade Hudson, a long-time friend who became her manager in 2022.

“He’s somebody that she trusts,” says Michael Cadoch, a reporter for Lainey Gossip, a long-standing and influential Hollywood gossip site. “He works with Kim [Kardashian] and Paris [Hilton]; a lot of people were confused when she was seen hanging out with Kim [at a Calabasas “slumber party” in November last year], but that was because of Cade. I know he’s in her life – he is also the one who put out a statement after her arrest.”

Earlier this month, Spears appeared in a photo posted to Instagram with Hudson, the actor Molly Shannon and songwriter Diane Warren, who described them as “old friends”. “It seems to be that anyone [Spears lets in] is through Hudson,” Cadoch says.

Hudson, however, is a divisive figure among Spears’ fans, some of whom believe that he is still associated with her conservatorship and the figures who enforced it, or that he has been appointed as her “handler”. Pilar Vigneaux Delporte was “director of communications” for the #FreeBritney movement that campaigned for the end of Spears’ conservatorship: “Why is [Hudson] ‘managing’ Britney if she isn’t working?” she asks. “What he is is a handler. And if she is still having handlers, that’s because the same people are still in charge behind the scenes.”

In the comment that followed Spears’ arrest, Hudson said that her behaviour was “completely inexcusable” and that “hopefully this can be the first step in long overdue change that needs to occur in Britney’s life”. “There’s obviously going to be fans online who have their opinions,” says Cadoch, adding: “I happen to believe he does have her best interests at heart.”

Delporte – with a large proportion of Spears’ fanbase – does not believe that there is anything concerning about the singer’s behaviour. She insists that Spears is not ill and she is not “mad” – she is the victim of a smear campaign from those around her, who for years have made a concerted effort to portray her as such.

“If you analyse her [dancing videos], she did pretty much the same thing on stage,” Delporte says. “It’s the setting that’s unsettling, you know? But if you put that on top of a stage with great clothes and make-up, people would be giving her a standing ovation. The people around her still want to force the narrative that Britney’s crazy. It’s been like that since 2007.”

Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in 2006 in Los Angeles, California. Photo / Bauer-Griffin, GC Images

There is a division between those who believe that, in her freedom, Spears should be able to do and post exactly what she pleases, and those who believe it is clear that she needs help. Some – critics and fans alike – even argue that she should be placed back in a conservatorship, albeit with a different conservator.

There are others who insist, as Spears herself has said, that the videos she posts are the result of her emancipation. “I don’t think it’s responsible to make assumptions about someone based on what they post on social media, nor do I think it’s a problem for Britney Spears or any other adult to sexualise themselves on social media if that’s what they want to do,” says one long-term observer who works in the entertainment industry.

“I think the irresponsibility in the media lies in pieces that repeatedly paint her as a sad case or a ruined person, rather than what she is, which is a survivor,” the fan continues. “I think pieces that hand-wring about her current state are repeating the same behaviour the media exhibited toward her in the early [2000s].” (The same source also argues that mainstream media and social-media users alike have not been so unkind to male celebrities with similar mental health issues.)

If the past five years have been a sort of second adolescence, then Spears’ first act of rebellion was to publish a book. Shortly after the conservatorship was lifted, in January 2022, Spears signed a deal with publisher Simon & Schuster, reportedly worth US$15m, for her memoir. It was short and sweet at just 275 pages long, but packed a punch in terms of the allegations it made about her parents, her upbringing, and the horrors of the conservatorship. Her story has been written so many times that it has become folklore, but this time, she told it in her own words.

Britney Jean Spears was born on December 2, 1981, in McComb, Mississippi, and grew up in Kentwood, Louisiana, the second of three children born to Jamie and Lynne Spears. “Tragedy runs in my family,” she wrote in the first chapter of her memoir. Following the loss of their newborn baby, Spears’ grandfather June Spears snr sent his wife Jean to an asylum, where she was forced to take lithium, she explains. Jean – Jamie’s mother – later took her own life. Spears snr sent his second wife there, too. The singer seems to suggest that it is a disturbing pattern that has echoed down the generations: decades later, under her father’s conservatorship, Britney would be sent to rehab against her will on multiple occasions and given the same medication.

By her account, her parents constantly argued and her father drank heavily. Perhaps as an escape from an unhappy marriage, Lynne ploughed her energy into nurturing her eldest daughter’s talents. She was in dance lessons aged 3. She won her first talent show aged 6. She auditioned for the TV show The Mickey Mouse Club, which also starred Ryan Gosling, Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake (who would later become Spears’ boyfriend) aged 8. She wasn’t cast, but when she re-auditioned in 1992, she won a place in its final two seasons. By age 15, she had a record deal.

Everyone knows what happened next. Spears was a platinum hitmaker, America’s golden girl. But by 2007, she had lost it all. Following the birth of her two sons, close in age, with Federline, things started to unravel. She was just 24 and suffered from postnatal depression. Then her aunt Sandra Covington, with whom she had been exceptionally close, died in January 2007. In the February, Spears shaved her head, ended up in rehab, and hit a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella. That same year, she got divorced, partied, acted out in public, was charged with a hit-and-run (the charges were later dropped) and lost custody of her children.

In the now-infamous picture of her taking electric clippers to her long brunette hair in a California salon, she almost looks like she’s finding it funny. “Everyone thought it was hilarious,” she wrote in her memoir. “But nobody seemed to understand that I was simply out of my mind with grief.”

Britney made headlines when she shaved her hair off. Photo / Getty Images

The press at the time did not see it that way. She was profiled by Rolling Stone magazine in February the following year. “If there is one thing that has become clear in the past year of Britney’s collapse – the most public downfall of any star in history – it’s that she doesn’t want anything to do with the person the world thought she was,” wrote Vanessa Grigoriadis. “She is not a good girl ... She is an inbred swamp thing who chain-smokes, doesn’t do her nails, tells reporters to “eat it, snort it, lick it, f*** it,” and screams at people who want pictures for their little sisters.”

Her downfall from America’s sweetheart to public enemy number one was complete. She was not a victim; in the public’s eye she was mad and bad, an unfit mother, an agent of chaos. “While it may be true that Britney suffers from the adult onset of a genetic mental disease (or a disease created by fame, yet to be named),” continued Grigoriadis in Rolling Stone, unsympathetically, “or that she is a ‘habitual, frequent and continu­ous’ drug user, as the judge declared; or that she is a cipher with boundless depths, make no mistake – she is enjoy­ing the chaos she is creating.”

Spears was placed under a conservatorship – a court-ordered legal arrangement that transfers decision-making power where someone is incapacitated – on February 1, 2008, by her father and Andrew Wallet, the lawyer, aided and abetted by Lou Taylor, her then-business manager, and Larry Rudolph, her long-time manager. She alleges that her father controlled every aspect of her personal, financial and medical affairs; that he put her on a diet, bugged her house, treated her “like a criminal or a predator”, forced her to take medication and prevented her from having more children.

She was given an allowance and set bedtime and wake times. The slightest whiff of dissent saw her sent to rehab, she says – even when the only thing she was taking was over-the-counter energy supplements. Meanwhile, she was expected to work as normal, showing up for a gruelling schedule of performances and appearances including a 248-show residency in Las Vegas, which grossed US$137.7m in ticket sales during its 2013-17 run. Spears would not have had access to the profits at the time, as her co-conservators had full control of her finances.

Britney Spears sparked fears for her safety and mental health after sharing a knife dancing video. Photo / Instagram

Jamie Spears has always maintained that the conservatorship was in his daughter’s best interests, saying in a 2022 interview, “I don’t know if she’d be alive” without it. Before his suspension as a conservator in 2021, his legal team said he “loves his daughter unconditionally” and has “dutifully and faithfully served as the conservator of his daughter’s estate without any blemishes on his record”.

Spears’ case shows “the worst of this system”, says Jasmine E Harris, a University of Pennsylvania law professor and disability rights expert. A conservatorship is supposed to support and safeguard; in Spears’ case, evidence suggests that it was used to control. In the US, there is no standardised system of check-ins with the conservator, and the agreements are often seen as more physically and legally constrictive for the conservatee.

It is no wonder that, in a post-conservatorship world, Spears has struggled to adjust. “Conservatorships routinely cast a very long shadow,” Harris says. “I think when people talk about that moment in 2021, it was almost as if the next day everything was going to be fine and she would [just] go to Starbucks and get her coffee. And it didn’t operate like that – she felt stripped of her womanhood and turned back into a child. That’s what this system does.”

Not only is there a complex web of legal documents to untangle, the conservatee has to rediscover their independence after years of having someone else make every decision – big or small – on their behalf.

“[There are] legal consequences, financial consequences, the impact on someone’s wellbeing ... What actually happens afterwards is complicated,” Harris says. “There’s a formal wind-down period where the conservatee is technically free but still entangled in the apparatus of conservatorship. There’s a process of someone having to re-enter the world of decision-making.”

Anyone exiting this kind of arrangement is expected to need extra support; support that Spears seems to be lacking. “For anyone who is put under conservatorship, especially for mental health reasons, one of two things happen once it’s lifted,” says Dr Gail Saltz, an associate professor of psychiatry at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, Weill-Cornell Medical College.

“One: they’re able to manage their finances, manage their mental health treatment, within fairly short order. Or the more common scenario: They continue to have support and help in various ways from trusted people,” Saltz says. “Therein seems to be the difficult scenario for this particular celebrity: She has made a lot of statements saying she doesn’t trust the person who held the conservatorship.”

Many people believe that Britney’s father is the villain of this story. But fame – the same potent force that catapulted Spears on to the world stage at 16; that created her coquettish, virginal persona then gleefully destroyed it – is an even bigger monster, one that Spears will never be able to outrun. Her father – and those who helped him – should take responsibility for the lasting harm her conservatorship has caused. But it is Britney who, once again, has been forced to bear it.

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