Britney Spears: ‘They made me feel like I was nothing’

AFP

“They made me feel like it was nothing, and I accepted it,” Britney Spears, 40, said of the 13 years she was under her father’s guardianship in an audio message released on Sunday. The audio message was originally posted on Twitter by the singer without comment.

The link has been deleted, but the 22 minutes of audio are still available on the internet. “This morning when I woke up, I realized that there are a lot of things going through my head that I haven’t shared with anyone,” she says emotionally in the recording.

She then details the guardianship, echoing what she testified in a California courthouse at an explosive hearing last year. The singer describes being forced to work and tour and banned from seeing her friends or driving her own car.

Spears claims her phone was tapped and she felt unsure about asking for help. She also described how they were ashamed of her weight. “It was demoralizing,” she adds. “While all this was going on, my mother witnessed it, my brother, my friends… they all accepted it.”

The “Little Princess of Pop” rose to fame as a teenager with hits like “Baby One More Time”, becoming one of the biggest stars in the world. In 2007, she suffered a high-profile nervous breakdown, after which the court decided to place her under the guardianship of her father, Jamie Spears.

It wasn’t until November 2021 that a Los Angeles judge overturned the conservatorship. Spears had already mentioned the matter briefly after the end of the guardianship, which she classified as “abusive” and which prevented her, among other things, from fulfilling her desire to have more children, because she was prevented from having her IUD (Intrauterine Device) removed. .

Since regaining her freedom, she has married her boyfriend, Sam Asghari. On Friday, the star released her first song in six years, a duet with Elton John called “Hold Me Closer,” a version of John’s ballad “Tiny Dancer.”