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Britney Spears testifies that conservators kept her from having a baby: ‘I have an IUD in my body’

Singer testifies in court about decades-long financial conservatorship, comparing it to ‘slave labour’

Josh Marcus
San Francisco
Thursday 24 June 2021 03:38 EDT
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Pop star Britney Spears says the team managing her decades-long financial and personal conservatorship used an IUD to prevent her from having more children, she testified in a courtroom in Los Angeles on Wednesday. The comments are the first breaking the long public silence about the 2008 stewardship arrangement which she now calls “slave” labour.

“I have an IUD in my body right now that won’t let me have a baby and my conservators won’t let me go to the doctor to take it out,” she told the court. “I feel ganged up on. I feel bullied and I feel left out and alone.”

“I want to be able to get married and have a baby,” she added.

Since 2008, Spears’s personal and business affairs have been controlled by a conservatorship agreement set up following a public mental breakdown that became a paparazzi sensation. Her father, Jamie Spears, has been in control of the agreement since, ceding partial control in 2019 to an attorney and a trust group.

The conservatorship has the power to make her medical decisions and her business deals, the Associated Press previously reported. It can restrict her visitors, take out restraining orders in her name, and it has the power to approve her major life decisions, such as getting married.

During the hearing, Spears made her first public comments on the matter since a number of damning documentaries about the conservatorship came out in recent months, including The New York Times’s ‘Framing Britney Spears.’ She said that the agreement forced her to go on a tour when she didn’t want to and to change her medications.

“I am not happy, I can’t sleep. I’m so angry, it’s insane. And I’m depressed,” she told the court. “My dad and anyone involved in this conservatorship, including my management … they should be in jail.”

The bombshell testimony comes a day after The New York Times reported on previously unknown attempts in recent years from the pop star to challenge her conservatorship, arguing it led her to be involuntarily given psychiatric treatment, among other things. Her attorneys have previously said she lacked the capacity to testify publicly about the ostensibly voluntary conservatorship arrangement.

Her father responded to the claims, telling the court in a statement he was “sorry” to hear how she was suffering.

”He is sorry to see is daughter suffering and in so much pain,” the statement read. “Mr Spears loves his daughter very much.”

Spears became famous at a young age, and was hounded by paparazzi, tabloids, and condescending TV interviewers until she had a public mental breakdown, famously shaving her head in 2007. Fans maintained a #FreeBritney movement for years, until the mainstream media and others re-examined her circumstances and showed it in a more sympathetic light, increasing the pressure to end the star’s conservatorship arrangement over her $60 million fortune.

“Any time Britney wants to end her conservatorship, she can ask her lawyer to file a petition to terminate it; she has always had this right but in 13 years has never exercised it,” Vivian Lee Thoreen, a lawyer for Mr Spears said in a statement to People earlier this year. “Britney knows that her Daddy loves her, and that he will be there for her whenever and if she needs him, just as he always has been – conservatorship or not.”

Fans gathered outside of the Los Angeles County Superior Court on Wednesday to show their support for the troubled singer, many carrying #FreeBritney signs.

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