Sam Levin in Los Angeles and agency 

Britney Spears’s father asks court to investigate forced labor and treatment allegations

Jamie Spears said he’s had no power over his daughter’s affairs for nearly two years after pop star called court arrangement ‘abusive’
  
  

Jamie Spears’s filings come a week after Britney Spears spoke for the first time in open court about the conservatorship.
Jamie Spears’s filings come a week after Britney Spears spoke for the first time in open court about the conservatorship. Photograph: AP

Britney Spears’s father has asked the court overseeing his daughter’s conservatorship to investigate her statements to a judge last week on the court’s control of her medical treatment and personal life, which she called overly restrictive and abusive.

James Spears, who goes by Jamie, said in a pair of documents filed late on Tuesday night that he has had no power over his daughter’s personal affairs for nearly two years.

His filing said the court must investigate “serious allegations regarding forced labor, forced medical treatment and therapy, improper medical care, and limitations on personal rights”. His attorneys also said that his daughter should have the “right to give informed consent for her own medical treatment”.

“Given the nature of the allegations and claims, it is critical that the court confirm whether or not Ms Spears’ testimony was accurate in order to determine what corrective actions, if any, need to be taken,” the documents said.

The filings come a week after Britney Spears spoke for the first time in open court about the conservatorship that has controlled her life and money for 13 years. She condemned those with power over her, saying she had been forced to perform live shows, compelled to use an intrauterine device for birth control, made to take lithium and other medications against her will, and prevented from getting married or having another child.

“I truly believe this conservatorship is abusive,” Spears said, adding that her father enjoyed the control over her.

Jamie Spears controlled his daughter’s personal life for most of the existence of the conservatorship, but he now oversees only her money and business dealings along with an estate-management firm. A court-appointed professional, Jodi Montgomery, has had power over Britney Spears’s personal decisions since her father relinquished that role in September 2019.

“Ms Montgomery has been fully in charge of Ms Spears day-to-day personal care and medical treatment.” His lawyers wrote that he was not involved in discussions of his daughter’s “self-care, marriage and reproductive desires” and “is unable to hear and address his daughter’s concerns directly because he has been cut off from communicating with her”.

Montgomery, whose appointment Britney Spears’s lawyer has supported, is serving temporarily.

The court was expected to make her role permanent, but one of Jamie Spears’s filings said his daughter’s criticism of Montgomery last week suggested that she doesn’t want her in the role.

Jamie Spears said that when he was conservator over his daughter’s personal decisions, he did everything in his power to support her wellbeing, including consenting to her getting married in 2012 and sharing conservatorship duties with her fiance. Spears was engaged to her former manager Jason Trawick in 2012, but the couple broke it off in 2013.

The filing was also critical of Britney Spears’s personal attorney Samuel L Ingham III, saying that he wrongly asserted in a recent filing that the court had found Spears did not have capacity to consent to medical treatment and was using that as a pretext for a court order taking away her right to consent to treatments.

Ingham did not respond to a request for comment. Lauriann Wright, an attorney for Montgomery, said in a statement on Wednesday that Montgomery “has tirelessly acted in Britney’s best interests with the approval of her doctors and the oversight of the court”, and that since she was appointed in September 2019, “Montgomery and the medical team that she assembled have had one primary goal – to assist and encourage Britney in her path to no longer needing a conservatorship of the person.”

Every expenditure made by Montgomery on behalf of Britney Spears has to be approved by her father, who controls her estate, Wright’s statement said, adding, “Britney’s choice to marry and to start a family have never been impacted by the conservatorship while Ms Montgomery has been conservator of the person.” Montgomery said she hoped “that Britney continues to make meaningful progress in her wellbeing so that her conservatorship of the person can be terminated”.

While Britney Spears was critical of Montgomery and Ingham in her impassioned speech of more than 20 minutes, she singled out her father for some of her most scathing criticism.

She recounted an incident when she failed a series of psychological tests in 2019 and her father forced her to go into a mental hospital.

“I cried on the phone for an hour, and he loved every minute of it,” Spears said. “The control he had over someone as powerful as me, as he loved the control to hurt his own daughter 100,000%.”

Her father said through his lawyer at the hearing that he was sorry to see his daughter was in so much pain, and that he missed her.

He said in his court filings that it was imperative that “all parties be provided a full and fair opportunity to respond to allegations and claims asserted against them”.

“Either the allegations will be shown to be true, in which case corrective action will be taken,” his attorneys wrote, “or they will be shown to be false, in which case the conservatorship can continue its course. It is not acceptable for the conservators or the court to do nothing.”

Spears told the Los Angeles superior court judge Brenda Penny that she wanted the conservatorship to end, but she has not filed a petition with the court to end it. “I want changes going forward,” she said. “I deserve changes.”

Ingham said in court that she had not asked him to. Spears said in court that she was unaware she could petition to end it.

Penny called Spears’s comments courageous, but gave no clue about the actions she will take. An investigation and many more legal moves are likely before she makes a decision, and experts said she could be stuck in the arrangement for months or years.

The singer said she wanted to be able to choose her own lawyer, and advocates say that could help her expedite a process to formally challenge the conservatorship. The arrangement forces her to pay the court-appointed lawyer, who has made nearly $3m representing her, as well as counsel for her father and other parties.

Recent internal documents uncovered by the New York Times suggested that the singer had been expressing serious concerns about the conservatorship for years, but that little had changed in response.

 

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