What's Britney Spears up to, then?

in store = she is a grown-up = she is sexually active = a lot of so-called adults get in a ridiculous and revealing tizzy (cf response to john major story at the weekend)

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Too many kids for Britney

BRITNEY Spears disappointed some of the kids at Ronald McDonald House on Friday - but it wasn't her fault. The pop tart, who was expecting six to ten young cancer patients at the East 73rd Street dormitory, was a victim of her own popularity. "When she walked in, there were 60 kids there, with their parents," a spokeswoman for the facility said. "Some of the kids had talked their doctors into rescheduling their chemotherapy." Britney, who was with her little sister, gamely read from "Clifford the Big Red Dog," but she departed before posing for pictures with all the children and talking to them. "She left and they were crying," said one volunteer. "You can't do that to sick children. They're not well, and she made it even worse." But Britney's spokeswoman explained, "She did the best that she could. She went there with the best of intentions . . . The kids had a fantastic time. They invited her back."

I saw two movies in that week, if I remember correctly, Country Bears and Goldmember. Country Bears was fantastic, campy in every good sense of the term -- CHRISTOPHER WALKEN!

Goldmember made me cry.

The documents cited "irreconcilable differences" for the divorce.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6126834.stm

Or some tossers.

That is far too kind.

i had no idea how fucked up her situation was!

This is all the doing of Jamie Spears, her (allegedly) emotionally abusive recovered-addict father, who finally succeeded in his wrestle for Brit-Brit Control in February 2008. That was the year Britney’s public trainwreck (detailed poignantly in this Rolling Stone article) bottomed out and, while Britney was in the hospital, Jamie’s lawyers arranged the conservatorship that granted him exclusive rights to Britney’s personal life and financials. It was supposed to be temporary, just ’til she got back on her feet.

But when Britney got healthy, Jamie’s lawyers actually pushed for greater authority and, on October 28th of 2008, Jamie secured a permanent conservatorship. PERMANENT! So HE OWNS HER FOREVER!

Jenny Eliscu, who wrote Britney’s 2008 Rolling Stone cover story, said it’s “very rare for a young adult who is not extremely ill to have their rights assigned to a conservator.” Furthermore:

“[The conservatorship]‘s designed, ideally, to protect people who are seriously ill. We’re talking about people who are non compos mentis, according to the lawyers I consulted. Or they’re in a vegetative state. Or they’re just so old that they can’t take care of themselves anymore. But Britney? It was making less and less sense as time went on.”

Even Wikipedia states clearly that “Conservatorships are generally put in place for severely mentally ill individuals or seniors with dementia or Alzheimer’s.”

So what’s the deal? The Judge presiding over Britney’s case in 2010, when the conservatorship was once again renewed, told the press that Britney remained “susceptible to undue influence.” Eliscu theorizes that “political pressure on the courts to keep Britney off the streets” could be a factor. Meanwhile Britney has been “deemed unfit” to hire her own attorney (according to the Times UK), though she initially tried to. The lawyers Jamie hired — including Britney’s – “appear to have such a strong financial interest in maintaining the arrangement.”

According to The Times UK, friends of the Spears family “doubt [Jamie] is the right person to be taking care of his psychologically fragile daughter.”

In the meantime, Team Britney RAKING IT IN! By December 2009, Jamie had reportedly increased the value of Britney’s controlled assets tenfold, from $2,826,362 to $27,500,000. Jamie brought in more from her estate than he’s ever made in his life, and certainly more than he did from the construction business he started, which went bankrupt. The conservatorship is now going on three years as it was extended again in 2010. Is this really about protecting Britney for her own sake, or is it about turning her into a money-making machine?

http://www.autostraddle.com/its-not-britney-bitch-84052/

yeah :(

yeah its pretty thoroughly sad and fucked

iirc a conservatorship must be renewed yearly - "permanent conservatorship" is illegal in all 50 I'm pretty sure. I have no position on whether Jamie Spears is the right person for the position, know exactly zero about them, but I've escorted patients to & from yearly conservatorship renewals -- the situation is generally: Judge asks conservatee if he/she understands why they're there, conservatee responds either "to see whether I still need to be under a conservatorship" (in which case it's often not renewed if the conservatee desires independence) or "because you people are trying to set me up/because venusians ate my ham" etc and conservatorship is renewed.

Checking memory against wiki I see that there's probate conservatorship which isn't the same as Lanterman Petris-Short but I'm pretty sure Britney's under LPS because the issue was mental illness. Having a family conservator beats the shit out of a public one; not really sure her situation is at all fucked up, I'm sure her father is benefitting from her increased income but I also think (based only on publicly available evidence obv i.e. guessing from news stories etc which, grain of salt, but I take that grain of salt to be "it's probably much worse than what you hear") she's gravely disabled and requires either an active conservator or long-term hospitalization.

(the linked article really doesn't understand the conservatorship process, incidentally. For example, they write

while Britney was in the hospital, Jamie’s lawyers arranged the conservatorship that granted him exclusive rights to Britney’s personal life and financials. It was supposed to be temporary, just ’til she got back on her feet.

which I take as a misunderstanding of what's called a T-Con, or temporary conservatorship, which exists to protect a patient from being unnecessarily placed under full conservatorship. T-Con gets set up, after 30 days there's a hearing; often the T-Con is continued at that point so treatment can continue, and then if the patient remains dangerous to self or others or gravely disabled, full conservatorship is established. Note too that if no family member wants the position, a public conservator is assigned; this isn't a question of "Britney would be free if it weren't for her family." Either she gets a family conservator or she gets a public one, most likely.

Full conservatorship would, I imagine, takes months and months to establish, even if she was fully batshit. Which she may be, but I doubt it. Most likely she got the aforementioned temporary treatment, but even that I imagine leaves behind a tangle of paperwork and legal issues. Certainly the last public record of her being totally lucid was from years ago, no? Has there been a totally coherent, not at all weird interview or public appearance from her since the breakdown, robotic concert appearances aside? Then again, a friend of mine bumped into her playing with her kid (s?) at a Santa Monica playground not too long ago, and she wasn't all crazypants then, so who knows.

this comment from an article on autostraddle struck me as pretty otm:

"If only the outrage over a rehabilitated 29-year-old woman becoming the personal and financial property of a man she never even liked was half as loud as the chorus that once proclaimed her sexual ‘antics’ as degrading to women."

Full conservatorship would, I imagine, takes months and months to establish, even if she was fully batshit.

the process in CA at least in '92 (last I was up on their laws, could conceivably have changed) was 72-hour hold -> 14-day hold -> t-con (30 day hold) -> conservatorship.

Sounds possible, though I always thought it was harder than that to get someone more or less declared mentally incapable and transferring full conservatorship to someone else. I mean, there's got to be a higher bar than just a month, right? What about drug addicts or otherwise temporarily incapacitated individuals?