Britney Spears’s Father, Jamie, Speaks Out About Her Conservatorship
Jamie is crediting the conservatorship with saving Britney's life, and fans are not having it.
Britney Spears has been very public about her feelings towards her estranged family. While efforts have been made to reconcile with some of them (she’s been shouting out to little sister Jamie Lynn recently), it’s clear she still holds a lot of hatred for her dad, Jamie, who controlled much of her life under her 13-year conservatorship.
Now it seems the rage posts could increase even more after the father of the pop legend, gave an exclusive interview for The Daily Mail.
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In his first time speaking out in over a decade, according to the article, he fiercely defended his participation in the conservatorship. Yikes!
“My understanding of a conservatorship is to help someone regain their life and return back to society, and to be able to live normally,” he explained to The Daily Mail. “I want to say that I made a difference.”
“Where would Britney be right now without that conservatorship?” he adds. “I don’t know if she’d be alive.”
Fans everywhere are completely floored that Jamie would take such credit over Britney’s (non) dead body, especially since she said, “It felt like my dad was trying to kill me” in a recent Instagram post.
The profile covers a lot of Britney’s history over the past few years, from her rise to stardom in the late 1990s, to the pressures of celebrity life causing her to enter into various rehabilitation programs and treatment centers.
The Daily Mail also gave a widespread definition of how a conservatorship works — it’s typically “granted by a court for individuals who are deemed unable to make their own decisions” which is usually applied to those with severe cognitive dysfunction conditions.
Britney revealed in an E! News special from 2007 that she struggles with bipolar disorder, which causes challenging mood swings between depressive and manic behavior. This, and any actions that may have been related to bipolar behavior, could have been reason enough for courts to allow the conservatorship to proceed.
The interview details that Britney’s conservatorship covered practically every inch of her life — personal finances, career plans, how she could interact with her two sons Jayden James and Sean Preston, and even who she could eventually marry (she officially divorced Kevin Federline in 2007). She wasn’t even allowed the option to go off of birth control.
The pure rigidness and length that Britney was forced to endure under her dad and the court’s thumb, sparked the #FreeBritney movement.
Getting Britney back into a stable financial circumstance was part of the plan, as she had reportedly accrued nearly $50 million in debt when the conservatorship began.
“She was broke,” Jamie said, explaining how he became the person who reportedly controlled all of these elements. “We worked – and she worked – and she got herself straight up financially.”
What most people don’t realize is that the people in charge of a conservatorship can be entitled to a cut of these earnings for managing the process; Jamie paid himself $16,000 a month, or the equivalent of $192,000 per year, for handling his daughter’s life.
Since her release from it however, Britney has come forward with allegations of abuse during this timeframe, including being forced to work inhumane hours during her Las Vegas performance residency at the Park MGM.
If it wasn’t about the money, what was it about then? Jamie defended his choice to enter into the conservatorship based on protecting Britney’s sons. “The main purpose was to get Britney back with her kids in a comfortable relationship,” he explains.
He said that he took on the role of caretaker for the kids while Britney was dealing with her divorce and treatments, and while Federline eventually gained full custody of the children, Jamie still played a very large role in their lives.
“They didn’t miss time with their mother,” Jamie stated. “They didn’t miss time with their father. Not many people knew that.”
Jamie detailed a close relationship with Federline, which was rocky at first, but has since calmed. According to Page Six, Federline is working on a book about fatherhood, which will most likely contain details the public has not yet heard, and Jamie’s participation in the process has been vital, the interview states.
