A year after a Los Angeles judge overhauled Britney Spears’ conservatorship, her father Jamie Spears spoke out in defense of the 13-year arrangement, telling The Sun in a Saturday interview, “That conservatorship was one hell of a time, and without it I don’t know if she would be alive now.”
Spears, who was appointed to oversee his daughter’s personal life and finances in February 2008, insisted that he always acted in her best interests. “I love my daughter with all my heart and soul,” he said. “This situation between us is just terrible.”
During and since Spears’ court battle, she accused her father of financial misconduct, privacy invasions and emotional abuse, testifying that she was “afraid of him” and would not perform as long as he controlled her career. Backed by the fan-driven #FreeBritney movement, the singer filed to have her father removed as conservator in August 2020. A month later, she requested to have the case made public. By the following year, Jamie Spears would step down. The conservatorship was officially terminated in November 2021.
In the new interview, Jamie Spears contested Britney’s account of the highly restrictive, “slave”-like guardianship, as she called it. “My main purpose was to get Britney back with her kids in a comfortable relationship,” he said, adding that he did not believe she “would’ve gotten the kids back without the conservatorship.”
He claimed that Britney spent plenty of supervised time with her two sons as well as their father Kevin Federline, with whom he shared custody for most of the 13 years.
In 2019, Federline took out a restraining order against Jamie Spears after a physical altercation with one of her sons.
Spears also praised the conservatorship for allowing Britney to “[get] herself straight up financially.” At the beginning of the arrangement, she was worth an estimated $50 million. However, her father claimed she “was broke” and had “no money whatsoever.”
Britney acknowledged the one-year anniversary of her freedom in a since-deleted Instagram post stating that “it felt like my dad was trying to kill me.”
“If I was valued and respected, then my father would be locked up in two seconds! People say you will have to put up a lot of money and sue and sit for hours and not be able to use my feet again when I want to run outside, no thank you, to prove these allegations are true!” the post read.
“I will never put up more money and to go to court to see if my dad gets prosecuted! I choose to smile and put it in my family’s face until the day I die.”
