Britney Spears is back on trend

The legal agreement banning Britney Spears from managing her own life and finances predates the pop star when she appeared as an energetic 12-year-old girl on Disney Channel, and the controversy over who rules her is returning. boiling.

Spears, 39, has been living under that strict regime since her infamous collapse, which prompted a California court in 2008 to place her under a single legal guardianship, as she was largely treated by her father, Jamie.

Custody, the exact grounds and conditions of which can be found in confidential court documents, has been increasingly scrutinized in recent years, especially after Spears canceled her second Las Vegas residency in 2019 and entered an indefinite professional hiatus .

Now an FX documentary produced in conjunction with The New York Times delves into the popular legend about Spears, who rose to world fame as teenage hits, including ‘Baby One More Time,’ before unleashing a dramatic slip. The cannibal appetite of the paparazzi.

The film highlights the role of the early 2000s tabloid press and celebrities in the breakup of Spears, and shows how she was a relentless media target.

The # FreeBritney movement, which employs hundreds of thousands of ardent fans who believe she is a hostage, gained traction last year when the singer lobbied in court to remove her father from the role of guardian.

His defenders, whom many – including Jamie Spears – consider just conspiracies, say the star is asking for help with coded messages, emoticons, and even the color of his clothes on his eccentric Instagram account.

They claim that Spears has sent signals enough to regain her own custody, especially after her court-appointed attorney told a judge, “My client has told me she is afraid of her father.”

The judge chose not to immediately remove Spears’s father as head of her estate, but appointed the financial firm Bessemer Trust as joint guardian.

Jamie Spears stepped back in her custody of Britney in 2019, a role that even gave her power over her medical and mental health decisions, after breaking a colon.

For the time being, the pop icon is not meant to banish guardianship, a legal figure normally intended for the elderly or disabled, but to grant it to professionals.

She hopes the tutor who now has temporary custody of her will remain so, and she would like to have a bank to manage her finances.

The next hearing is scheduled for February 11.

The documentary ‘Framing Britney Spears’ suggests that the once worldly pop superstar was manipulated and led to emotional ruin by an insatiable media environment, in which her images sold for over a million dollars.

From her days as a spunky preteen on “Star Search” in 1992 to when she appeared with her head shaved in 2007, the documentary features a magnetic superstar whose image became everyone’s but hers.

The documentary shows how prominent news anchor Diane Sawyer pressures her to explain why she did ‘something’ to cause ‘so much pain’ to her partner, the no less famous Justin Timberlake, during their breakup, a situation that left Spears. as one interviewee said, as “the whore of the class.”

And Matt Lauer, the now disgraced former morning television character, brings her to tears in a 2006 interview lashing out at her physical state while pregnant with her second child.

During her protracted nervous breakdown that followed her battle for divorce and custody in 2006, Spears was photographed barefoot or riding with a child in her lap at gas stations.

In another scene, he grabs an umbrella and starts hitting a paparazzi car, an image that has become iconic.

Moya Luckett, a New York University media historian whose research includes celebrity culture, says the “cruelty” Spears experienced today is fading into a social media landscape where stars can select their own images.

“You will become your own producer,” Luckett said, pointing to stars like Taylor Swift or Beyonce who took over the conversation on Instagram or participated in their own documentaries.

As her legal battle escalates, the fascination with Spears is likely to persist, especially as fans, many of them in their 30s and 40s, who worshiped her in her youth, consider the singer’s plight for their own destiny.

“Everything she’s going through resonates with the kind of frustrations many of us have, in a neoliberal world where we’re told we can all do it if we want to,” Luckett said.

“And then we found out that we really can’t.”