Doing right by Britney, and her fandom
Spears and her fans are uniquely linked, a shared rebuke to an entire system.
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The #FreeBritney movement, once dismissed as a “damaging” fan theory, was finally validated by Britney Spears herself. —Kate
Only two years ago, outlets like Jezebel were describing the #FreeBritney movement as “speculative to the point of being potentially damaging.” On April 16, 2019—about two weeks after Britney Spears checked into a mental health facility following the cancellation of her Las Vegasresidency, Domination—the podcasters behind Britney’s Gram theorized that Spears’s conservatorship was forcing her to get treatment against her will and generally controlling her life to an abusive extent. TMZ and others emphatically refuted the claims, saying a conservatorship does not permit the conservator to force drugs or mental health treatment onto the conservatee. Last night—two years, a documentary, and full-blown social media movement later—Spears alleged that her conservatorship did exactly that. And more.
I read her full statement while hunched over my phone at a restaurant, gasping out loud to my friends when I read words like “lithium” and “forced IUD.”
“I’m not happy. I can’t sleep. I’m so angry it’s insane,” she says in a line that I keep reading over and over.
We learned a lot about Spears this past year. While this is her most explosive revelation to date—and the first time she herself has spoken out—there was a similar reckoning following the release of The New York Times documentary Framing Britney Spears in February. The project was centered around the conservatorship, already a hot topic, but its reflection on the pop star’s rise and subsequent mistreatment by the media was what really got people talking. The documentary and, now, Spears’s testimony have inspired similar responses on social media: Waves of We should have known.
Thing is, her fandom did.
“Leave Britney alone,” Chris Crocker demanded through tears in his viral 2007 video. He cited her divorce, custody battle, and portrayal in the press as extreme hardships—which are the very same hardships Framing Britney Spears explored almost 15 years later, to near-universal sympathy. But Crocker was laughed off the internet as an obsessed fan.
Looking back at the Britney’s Gram episode, it’s chilling to see just how close they were to the truth. In it, an anonymous source alleged that Spears’s father found out she wasn’t taking her medication as prescribed and canceled her Domination residency because she refused to take it.
Now we have Spears’s own words: “There was a [one] week period where they were nice to me ... they said if I don’t want to do the new Vegas show, I don’t have to because I was getting really nervous ... I remember telling my assistant … ‘If I say no, I feel like they’re gonna come back and be mean to me or punish me or something.’ Three days later, after I said no to Vegas, my therapist sat me down in a room and said he had a million phone calls about how I was not cooperating in rehearsals, and I haven’t been taking my medication. All this was false. He immediately, the next day, put me on lithium out of nowhere.”
It was not, as the podcast originally alleged, her team that wanted to cancel the residency, but Spears herself. But the core concern—that Spears was unhappy and trapped in an abusive legal arrangement—is exactly what she is now alleging. Like Crocker, #FreeBritney was initially dismissed, characterized as the ravings of superfans. Britney’s Gram cohost Tess Barker told Jezebel that she hoped “that bringing this information to light [would lead] to further journalistic and legal investigation of the individuals tasked with overseeing Britney Spears’s finances and well-being.”
It did. And not only that, the hashtags and protests and outside the courtroom could well have contributed to Spears’s own confidence to finally speak out.
“That’s why I didn’t want to say any of this to anybody, to the public, because I thought people would make fun of me or laugh at me and say, ‘She’s lying, she’s got everything, she’s Britney Spears,’” Spears says. “I’m not lying. I just want my life back.”
While Spears doesn’t explicitly reference her fans in her statement, she shares something intimate with them: a history of public derision. Fandoms are typically written off and mocked as frivolous, recognized when they’re pranking a president and otherwise dismissed. Spears and her fandom are uniquely linked, not only because they have both been ridiculed and ignored, but because of the urgency and importance of what they stand for—a woman's freedom—and how that pursuit is a rebuke to an entire system. We should have known. We should have listened.