The entertainment industry’s exploitation of its child stars has a long history. The difference is that in the old days, MGM put Judy Garland on a cycle of amphetamines and barbiturates behind closed doors, while the saga of Britney Spears played out for all the world to see. Or so we thought. As the New York Times documentary Framing Britney Spears explores, the reality was even worse than it seemed at the time.
The singer went from child starlet to hard partying pop princess under the microscope of paparazzi chasing her across Hollywood and predatory news anchors and media executives waiting for her to fail. But since her highly publicized mid-aughts breakdown, you know, the shaved head, the umbrella, the hospital stints, Spears’s public persona has been micromanaged by her father Jamie, with whom Britney Spears is now in an all out legal battle against.
The “Free Britney” movement is a complicated saga that broadly goes something like this: After Spears’s breakdown, the courts approved her father’s push to put her under a conservatorship, a legal arrangement granting a conservator (in this case, Jamie) full legal control of her estate and her person. Conservatees are usually senile seniors unable to care for themselves or highly disabled people unable to make decisions for themselves. As the documentary explores, Spears conceded that coming under a conservatorship was an inevitability, but she specifically did not want her father, who was a largely absent alcoholic during her childhood, to be the conservator. Spears has evidently gotten her personal issues, which included some combination of mental illness and substance abuse, under control and her career rebounded. But the conservatorship has remained in place, and Jamie and his allies are still able to use it to milk his multimillionaire daughter for cash.
How did Spears get to this point, fighting in court for a decade to have the basic right to post to her own social media or to use her own money? The truth is that this result was an inevitability, one orchestrated by the adults who turned this unusually gifted child into some pimped out Lolita loathed and loved in equal measure by the media.
Even in the pre-social media era, Spears was unusually exposed as a child, with her mother Lynne dragging her across the country for auditions and Jamie betting on Spears’s talent to bankroll the family. After a few years on the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Spears got two years as a normal high school girl, and that was it. By age 16, Spears was shaking her butt in a slutty Catholic school girl costume for her nationally famous “… Baby One More Time” music video, and before she turned 20, the question of whether or not she was a virgin became a favorite tabloid topic.
So the studios dolled Spears up into a teenage sexpot, and the press loved to hate it. Everyone, from the parents who pimped her out to the news and entertainment media who kept her in the spotlight, got to profit from this endless cycle. And after nearly a decade of constant media attention, harassment, and mockery, Spears broke.
It now seems pretty likely that Spears suffered from untreated postpartum depression. Combine that with hard partying friends and agents supplying a constant flow of drugs and alcohol and obsessive stalking from a media rooting for her marriage and her mothering to fail, and a breakdown seems more like a certainty than an accident.
And so Jamie secured the conservatorship, but instead of encouraging, let alone allowing, Spears to take a break, she was guest starring on How I Met Your Mother the very next month. She was out with another blockbuster album the same year and on tour the next.
Somehow Spears brought her A-game back, but instead of giving back more of her life, Jamie and his lawyers have tightened their control over her. After a decade of dutifully working and enriching a once deadbeat dad, Spears finally stopped working in protest, promising only to return to work once her father ceases to control her life.
Her parents, her producers, and the press never gave Spears a chance, and that she survived in spite of a situation beckoning her to become the next Marilyn Monroe is a testament to a sort of fortitude that belies the bimbo persona cast upon her. But Spears deserves a second start at owning her story, and that starts with freedom.
