Britney Spears in 2019. Public speculation about Spears’ mental state has reached a fever pitch unseen since the 2000s. Photo / Getty Images
Britney Spears in 2019. Public speculation about Spears’ mental state has reached a fever pitch unseen since the 2000s. Photo / Getty Images
THE FACTS
In 2021, a judge terminated Britney Spears’ 13-year conservatorship.
Kevin Federline’s new memoir urges fans to “Save Britney,” claiming concerns for her mental health.
Public speculation about Spears’ mental state has since reached a fever pitch unseen since the 2000s.
Obsessive fandom must not become its own sort of conservatorship.
On that November day in 2021, when a judge terminated the 13-year conservatorship that had stripped Britney Spears of control over her life and finances, she could finally live on her own terms. But ever since, an onlinechorus of onlookers has howled about how she’s displayed that freedom on social media – in rambling Instagram captions, videos in which she dances wildly and nude images with only emojis covering her body.
Now, in a new memoir, Kevin Federline, a man most famous for being Spears’ ex-husband, urges her fans, many of whom advocated the end of Spears’ conservatorship in the first place, to “Save Britney” from what he characterises as impending doom because of her mental health struggles (even though he has said he has not spoken to his former wife in years). His book has brought a slew of media coverage that recounts lurid allegations against Spears involving sex, drug use and parenting debacles. Now, public speculation about Spears’ mental state has reached a fever pitch unseen since the 2000s, when the courts placed Spears’ father in control of much of her life, including her mental health care, her working conditions, her travel and her fortune.
But this time, it isn’t just the paparazzi following Spears’ every move; social media is the new tabloid, where anyone can play the role of gossipmonger. Today, even messy eyeliner or an untidy household have become enough for onlookers – whether they’re anonymised social media users, clout-chasing influencers or figures with varying degrees of connection to Spears’ past – to call for Spears’ conservatorship to be reinstated, stripping her yet again of the ability to make her own decisions. So why on earth is anyone listening to them?
Social media creates a cacophony that is difficult to ignore. Take Reddit, where “snark” forums – places for users to obsessively hate on influencers and celebrities, usually women – can be algorithmically pushed to those who engage with celebrity-related content. One subreddit that scrutinises Spears, which was created in 2023, receives close to 200,000 weekly views. One of its most popular posts compares a video of Spears dancing in 2018 to a video of her dancing in a bikini in 2024. In the earlier video, Spears’ choreographed movements are tighter and her hair appears more freshly dyed.
“This is what happens when you go off your meds, stop going to therapy, and end up with brain damage,” one of the kinder comments reads. Others say that she needs medical intervention and that she is a danger to herself. Words like “manic,” “scary” and “delusional” are commonly used to describe Spears. Some commenters say they are concerned fans. Others say they cannot stop laughing at her.
“Some of the language that I see increasing over time around celebrities like Britney Spears are the use of words like ‘crazy,’ ‘dangerous,’ you know, ‘unsafe,’” June Gruber, a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder, told me. “The public response is often to pathologise these behaviours rather than show compassion.”
Male celebrities are often indulged, if not praised, when they experience mental health struggles. A new biopic portrays Bruce Springsteen’s depression as key to his creativity. Fans laugh with the comedian Pete Davidson when he jokes about his drug use, frequent stints in rehab and his 2023 reckless driving episode when he crashed into a Beverly Hills home. Before Ye’s antisemitic antics derailed his career, many critics praised the 2018 album that was inspired, in part, by his bipolar diagnosis. (The artist has since said he was misdiagnosed and has autism.) None of these men were stripped of their autonomy and self-determination as Spears was – or as the former talk show host Wendy Williams, who is caught in a contentious guardianship, has experienced.
The differences in perception are rooted in gender. Stephen P. Hinshaw, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has written about the ways women are held to three conflicting standards: the empathetic caregiver, the sexy bombshell, the effortless overachiever. When women fail to meet them, he told me, they are likely to be stigmatised: “She’s crazy, she’s hysterical.” “She was never trustworthy and rational.” “She’s not a good mum.”
Kevin Federline's new memoir urges fans to "save Britney". Photo / Getty Images
Those standards didn’t just evaporate after Spears’ conservatorship ended, though her ability or desire to do the soul-bending work of meeting them may have. According to Spears, the conservatorship itself is what led to “brain damage” from being traumatised, restrained and medicated, versus Federline’s narrative of her alleged drug and alcohol abuse, as well as violent outbursts. Spears has denied those claims, calling them “extremely hurtful and exhausting”.
While any audience cannot know the intimate details of Spears’ health or conduct, how could she be expected to emerge from her conservatorship looking or acting exactly the same as she did 13 years earlier? Even so, some of Spears’ fans still feel she owes them her younger self. “I am a fan who wants answers,” one Reddit user posted. “Some of us grieve the old Britney.”
When the Free Britney movement started gaining viral traction online in the late 2010s, it was widely dismissed as a fandom conspiracy. Given that fans were hunting for clues in Instagram captions, stitching together unverified rumours and speculating on, well, everything, some of it was. But when Spears’ actual thoughts on the conservatorship were heard for the first time during her court testimony a few months before it ended, her impassioned plea suggested that the social media mob was right. In that moment, Spears’ fans actually could be trusted more than her family, members of her team and the legal system itself.
Since then, many fans who rallied to support freeing Spears have moved on. But others couldn’t let go of the idea that she needed to be rescued, by supposedly true fans who can decode something the rest of us can’t see. The conspiracies grew weirder, with theories that Spears had been replaced by a body double or deepfake.
This may be the Spears-shaming audience Federline is looking to harness with the new, juicy details in his memoir – especially those that portray her as incompetent at taking care of herself and others. Spears’ self-appointed saviours can’t force a renewed legal arrangement, but they can flex their power over her image. They can diagnose her from afar for their own entertainment.
Fans of Spears really did help her escape from an unjust situation, so much so that on the day she was freed, Spears thanked them for keeping her struggle against her conservatorship in the internet’s spotlight. But such a large audience’s benevolence – turbocharged by the tendencies of social media – stretches only so far before it curdles into something far more sinister: its own sort of conservatorship, with constraints dictated not by a judge, but by the whims of an online mob.
