Bird in a Gilded Cage

 

I find the Britney Spears conservatorship horrifying. If someone is mentally ill, the odds are that they were driven to it by their upbringing, by their family. The worst thing we can do is to deprive them of their rights and give all control to their family.

But that is exactly what we systematically do. If we merely stopped doing it, that alone might end much of the problem of mental illness. They might need help to look after their affairs; even if so, it would be far better to appoint some random stranger out of the phone book.

What happened to Britney Spears could happen to anyone, and once it happens, your life is over. This should not be possible in a free society.

I am excerpting passages from a piece by Ronan Farrow—that Ronan Farrow—and Jia Tolentino in the New Yorker.

Butcher had been told that she would be required to give more testimony and answer questions. Instead, according to Butcher, Lynne told her, “It’s taken care of.” The judge, Reva Goetz, who has since retired, arrived and announced that the conservatorship had been granted. “The whole process was maybe ten minutes,” Butcher said. “No one testified. No questions were asked.”

Spears’s relationship with Jamie [her father], who could be domineering and hostile toward his daughter, was strained. Butcher recalled Lynne replying that the conservatorship would last only a few months, and that it would be best for Spears to resent Jamie, rather than her, when it was all over. But, after they joined Jamie in the conference room, Butcher said, Lynne began talking about her hopes for how the conservatorship would be managed, prompting Jamie to shout about his control over his daughter’s life, including Lynne’s access to her. At one point, Butcher recalled him bellowing, “I am Britney Spears!”

Three psychiatrists were asked to provide a necessary declaration confirming Spears’s lack of mental fitness. The third, James Spar, provided it. (Earlier this year, Spar said of Spears, on a podcast, “I don’t know why she still has a conservatorship.”)

From the earliest days of the conservatorship, Spears appeared to chafe against her constraints. While hospitalized, she had contacted a lawyer named Adam Streisand. He represented her in a court hearing on February 4th, attesting that Spears had a “strong desire” that Jamie not be a conservator. But the judge, based on a report from Ingham and testimony from Spar, ruled that Spears had no capacity to retain an attorney. 

In the following weeks, Jamie wore Spears down. “He would get all in her face—spittle was flying—telling her she was a whore and a terrible mother,” Butcher said. Spears was told that she could see her kids again only if she coöperated.

Jamie got rid of anyone his daughter had been close to. 

In behind-the-scenes footage of workdays and rehearsals, she gets visibly tense whenever Jamie is in the room. At one point, she does an impression of her father, adopting a thick Southern accent: “You know, she don’t listen to me. I scream at her and she gets onto me about screamin’ at her, but I can’t do it. You’re just gonna have to talk some fucking sense into her.”

Over the holidays, a woman came to perform a “psych test,” and then her father told her that she had failed it and needed to go to rehab. “I cried on the phone for an hour, and he loved every minute of it,” she said. “The control he had over someone as powerful as me—he loved the control to hurt his own daughter. One hundred thousand per cent, he loved it.”

This is all pure evil. Perhaps the experience of Britney Spears will expose the injustice.At least it may get the public's attention.