Britney Spears deserves respect, she deserves to have her dignity and she deserves to not have her personal issues published for the world to know. These seem like basic facts of life and how any adult, fame or not, should be treated.
Since her very public break down in 2007, she has had her children taken away, forced to be on birth control, and has been hospitalized numerous times. Not to mention she has lost the control to make any personal, professional, and/or financial decisions being placed under a conservatorship, a status usually reserved for the very elderly. For some background, a conservatorship is a legal arrangement that gives a court-appointed individual (generally a third party, non-family member) the power to handle all affairs of the conservatee’s life. These arrangements are extremely hard to legally reverse and are not intended for a young adult. This alone is an aggressive source of trauma for any individual.
The highlights of Britney’s legal conservatorship and alleged abuse by her father, Jamie Spears, were a blip on the social radar until recently when a documentary was released centered around the ‘#FreeBritney’ movement, a fan-driven action to release Britney of her conservatorship. It is amazing to see people stick up for each other and want what is best for a stranger, but how many facts do the public actually have? Can we assume that every bit of detail is released and that it is not one sided? Would the courts blatantly ignore such blatant abuse? Possibly, but how likely?
Clinically there is enough here – with safeguards in court hearings to likely document – that this young woman, as talented and amazing as she is also struggles with her mental health. There is very little to no doubt on that front just based on the age she was thrust into fame and the era of gross lack of privacy and rage of paparazzi at the height of her fame. What those struggles are cannot be something that is pushed out for the public to uncover.
Celebrities do not deserve the immense amount of pressure and lack of privacy that they endure. In this case, where you have attorneys and family overseeing someone that clearly has led a very public and intimately private life behind sealed documents should be able to have the world respect her ability to take it from here.
Her new attorney should, if they haven’t already, have a psychologist and psychiatrist on a team to support their client, independent of their control, and have the ability to manage the frenzy of the Free Britney movement stand down. I, like so many, wish her the best and hope and pray she can come out the other end of this ordeal with her head held high.
