What a difference two years make.
Back in spring 2019, the tabloids were training their gaze on the
mental health of pop star Britney Spears—who’d recently reemerged from
rehab after canceling her latest Vegas show — and the rise of a
#FreeBritney fan movement rallying for her release from a decade-long
California “probate conservatorship.” Called a guardianship in other
states, the arrangement gives a court-approved third-party control over
the affairs of an incapacitated, typically elderly, person. In Britney’s
case, the conservator is her father, Jamie, and he’s controlled almost
every detail of her finances, healthcare, and personal life since her
“breakdown” in 2008.
The unusual spectacle of constraining a highly functioning young
adult stirred the press to weigh in on the issue, with many articles
commenting on whether there was reason for Spears to remain under the
conservatorship. As Mad in America found in its examination
of media coverage of her mental health published since the
conservatorship’s inception, these articles reflected conventional
attitudes about “mental illness” that are stigmatizing and encourage
legislation that promotes forced treatment. They also reflected the
opinions of everyone but Britney herself (save the postings on her
often-cryptic Instagram account).
According to this narrative, Britney — despite over a decade of
apparent stability and success — needs to be in the conservatorship for
her own good, allegedly because she is too “crazy” and too vulnerable to
exploitation to manage her own life. Any arguments to the contrary were
viewed as conspiracy theories from well-meaning but ignorant fans.
But now things are changing in both Spears’ world and media coverage
of her case. These shifts have brought overdue attention to the larger
issue of the rights of people labeled mentally ill or disabled — and led
to calls for reform.
Back in the Spotlight
Since last fall, Spears, now 39, seems to be pursuing a path toward
autonomy. Via her court-appointed attorney, Sam Ingham, she has
requested that court documents related to her case be unsealed (to make
them more accessible to the public) and told a judge that she is “afraid
of her father” and “will not perform again if [he] is in charge of her
career.” US Weekly,
which had earlier portrayed her as unstable and in need of TLC, titled
an article on her legal motion “Britney Spears Is Tired of Being Treated
Like a Child” and described her as “fighting for her freedom.”
A few months later, Spears requested that her father step down from
managing her finances and be replaced by a professional fiduciary,
Bessemer Trust. It didn’t happen; Bessemer and Jamie Spears now share
that task, but the shift prompted NBC News’s online THINK column to run an opinion piece that addressed the larger issue of guardianship abuse. In the piece, titled “Britney Spears’ Conservatorship Can Be Both Totally Legal and Quite Bad for Her. Many Are,”
journalist Chandra Bozelko argued that “there are emotional costs of a
long-term conservatorship, especially to an otherwise capable person,
and that damage rarely appears in court evaluations or public records.”
Bozelko, who was under guardianship for a decade, wrote that “to strip a
person of her agency can’t help but be abusive, even when fiduciaries
are doing their jobs.”
But that was the last we heard on the subject until the first week of February 2021, coinciding with the 13th anniversary of Spears’ conservatorship. That week, the documentary Framing Britney Spears was released on the FX channel. Produced by a team from The New York Times
(which had previously reported fairly uncritically about her
situation), the film opens with footage of #FreeBritney activists. A few
minutes in, New York Times Senior Editor Liz Day asks the film’s million-dollar question: “Is this in her best interest, what she wants?”
The film blends archival photos and footage with new interviews with
longtime associates, including her close friend and former assistant,
Felicia Culotta. It also features #FreeBritney activists, reporters and
press photographers who have covered her, and legal experts close to the
case. It tells of Britney’s rapid rise as a teenaged pop star, the
emotional and practical impact of the news media’s relentless pursuit,
and the often hostile and salacious treatment of her before her famous
breakdown.
In so doing,
Framing Britney places behaviors often cited as
evidence of Spears’ mental illness in context. Shaving her head and
whacking a photographer’s car with an umbrella are shown as the very
human reactions of an overwhelmed, post-partum woman under relentless
public scrutiny and beset by private struggles including a custody
battle. As Jude Ellison S. Doyle
writes in the politics and culture magazine
GEN,
“How could anyone not experience trauma after this sort of treatment?”
Doyle adds, “Britney Spears isn’t a formerly happy pop star who ‘lost
control,’ she’s a woman who never had control in the first place.”
Indeed, except for reporting on Britney’s stints in psych facilities,
the film doesn’t dwell on the claim that she suffers from a chronic,
debilitating condition, as has so often been stated in the press.
The documentary also explores the uncomfortable realities of living
under a conservatorship, including a clip from an MTV documentary in
which Britney complains about how stifling it is to be constantly
restrained and monitored. “When I tell them how I feel, they’re really
not listening,” she says. “They’re hearing what they want to hear. It’s
bad, and I’m sad.” The film also points out irregularities in how she
was placed under the conservatorship in the first place and wonders if
she’ll ever get out.
In one scene, Adam Streisand, a lawyer she wanted to hire to fight
the conservatorship in 2008, explains that the judge ruled Britney
incompetent to do so, citing a medical report that the judge refused to
let him see. “I felt that based on my interactions that she was capable
of retaining and directing me and the judge should have allowed that,”
Streisand says.
In another scene, attorney Vivian Lee Thoreen admits, “It’s the
conservatee who has the burden to say, ‘I don’t need this
conservatorship anymore, and here’s why,’” later adding, “I have not
seen a conservatee who has successfully terminated a conservatorship.”
The film also outlines the financial incentives and possible
conflicts of interest Britney’s conservators might have for keeping her
in the arrangement. It notes that her father got a percentage of her
high-grossing Las Vegas acts and that her estate is required to pay for
her own and her conservators’ attorneys — concerns once portrayed as fan-generated conspiracy theories.
Despite that Spears did not participate in the film (producers claimed they labored unsuccessfully to reach her), Framing Britney is
notable for its empathic perspective. It encourages viewers to put
themselves in Spears’ shoes as they watch her rise, fall, and comeback,
as well as her ongoing containment. This is a departure from what we saw
in earlier coverage, which tended to favor her father’s and handlers’
positions. Britney’s family, attorney, and inner circle declined to be
interviewed for the film, though some of them appeared in archival
footage.
A Strong Reaction
Perhaps because her pain is so relatable, the film quickly ignited
widespread alarm. Social media were aflame with renewed calls to
#FreeBritney, supportive commentary from lawyers, tweets sharing
excerpts from court documents, and demands that media figures apologize
to Spears. The American Civil Liberties Union, which had offered to
represent her last summer, reiterated its support in a Tweet:
In tandem, mainstream news and cultural commentators discussed the misogyny portrayed in the film:
how Hollywood has exploited and perpetuated dangerous narratives about young stars, how our culture has
failed to listen to and center women in their own stories, and how we punish those deemed unruly.
And the press continued to focus on the star’s struggles under her
unique conservatorship. In late February, Spears’ father delivered an
official retort to Framing Britney on Good Morning America
via his now-attorney, Vivian Lee Thoreen. He reiterated that the
conservatorship is to “protect” his daughter and inaccurately stated
that Britney has never sought to remove him; Thoreen later wrongly
claimed that Britney can end it whenever she wants.
Then, at a hearing in March, Britney’s lawyer presented her request
that her father resign as conservator of her personal affairs and be replaced by Jodi Montgomery,
a professional fiduciary who has been temporarily filling that role.
Those court papers state, underlined and in bold, that Britney still
“reserves the right to petition for the termination of this
conservatorship.”
Beyond Britney
Soon, the press coverage generated by the film and the “Jamie vs.
Britney” battle moved beyond Britney to another important discussion:
the broader issue of guardianship abuse. Op-eds, explanatory pieces, and
think pieces called out its overly restrictive nature and documented
its potential for abuse. These reports continued for two months in
respected magazines on politics and economics as well as in the
entertainment press.
For example, journalist Sara Luterman, who covers disability rights,
was one of the first to address “the darker story just outside the
lens.” In The New Republic, she wrote that
“There is a broader, systemic issue at play. Spears isn’t an anomaly,
and in actuality, conservatorship has few safeguards and checks. Legal
personhood is regularly stripped from disabled people…and nobody blinks
an eye. The biggest difference is that Spears is famous. The unusual
part of the story is that people are paying attention.”
Luterman notes that many people as young or younger than Spears are under the control of guardians, citing a report
on a “school-to-guardianship pipeline in which conservatorship over
students with intellectual and developmental disabilities leaving school
is treated as a matter of course.” As Zoe Brennan-Krohn, a staff
attorney with the ACLU’s Disability Rights Project told her, “There’s
this double standard where, if you’re perceived as having a disability,
your preferences are subsumed by what’s in your, quote, best interest.”
Several outlets published articles on how conservatorships work and
why they can be problematic for anyone. As an op-ed by law professors
Rebekah Diller and Leslie Salzman put it in Business Insider:
“After exposés revealed critical
problems, many states reformed their laws in the 1990s. Today, in most
states, courts are supposed to consider less restrictive alternatives
and narrowly tailor any guardianship order to preserve maximum autonomy.
Yet these reforms, which are often ignored in practice, have not gone
far enough….”
They sum up: “Because guardianship has traditionally been justified
as a protective mechanism, the guardianship system is tainted by a
culture of paternalism. As a result, many courts still err on the side
of granting guardianship petitions even when less restrictive
alternatives would suffice.”
Similarly, The Economist published a piece titled “Why Are Conservatorships Controversial?” It answers that question this way:
“An alleged mental illness seems to be
the reason for Ms. Spears’s situation, but little is publicly known
about her diagnosis or condition. A conservatorship strips someone of
almost all their rights — much as imprisonment or commitment to an asylum does — and only a court can restore them. That is rare [italics added].”
The article also points out that:
“Legal gaps at the state level, where the
matter is regulated, make exploitation easier. For example, some states
let courts appoint ‘emergency conservators’ without notifying the
person in question or others who may come to their aid. The conservator
can often sell assets, such as a house, without extra court approval.
Patchy monitoring makes it hard to catch self-dealing.”
What didn’t we see in these pieces? The idea that Britney’s — or
anyone’s — mental health struggles justify their conservatorship in the
first place. Perhaps because having a diagnosis is beside the point. As
Doyle opined in GEN, “Spears likely does have a mental illness —
she’s undergone psychiatric hospitalizations — but a woman who can
raise two young boys while holding down a demanding full-time job as a
pop star is not incapacitated to the point that she requires an adult
guardian.”
From Talk to Action
The momentum generated by Framing Britney and press reports
on the impact of guardianships has led to a discussion of alternatives.
It has even prompted bipartisan calls for political action to reform the
conservatorship system in California and beyond, which have received
widespread news coverage. In an era when Democrats and Republicans can’t
seem to agree on anything, guardianship reform seems to be an
exception.
Former Arkansas Governor and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee launched this trend with his February 27 op-ed at FoxNews
online. He wrote: “The enormous scope of the conservatorship abuse
epidemic goes far beyond Spears, but often gets ignored by mainstream
news outlets.”
Huckabee cited dozens of guardianship abuse cases across America,
such as that of former court-appointed guardian Rebecca Fierle,
“charged with aggravated elder abuse and neglect following the death of a
ward in her care. Investigations into Fierle have also allegedly
uncovered staggering conflicts of interest and double-billing among
hundreds of cases that she handled in the state.” He concluded that the
topic “deserves national bipartisan reform and a grassroots campaign to
protect the most vulnerable members of our society entrapped by it.”
Less than two weeks later, Congressmen and House Judiciary Committee
members Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) took up Huckabee’s call.
Gaetz issued a press release announcing that they had sent a letter
to Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, “requesting that the House
Judiciary Committee convene a hearing to review and examine the plight
of Americans trapped unjustly in conservatorships.” Gaetz stated, “If
the conservatorship process can rip the agency from a woman who was in
the prime of her life and one of the most powerful pop stars in the
world, imagine what it can do to people who are less powerful and have
less of a voice.” The letter also cited reports by the federal Government Accountability Office and the Justice Department along with commentary from an ACLU attorney on conservatorship as a disability-rights issue.
The move generated headlines in major media including Vanity Fair
and the network news as well as the entertainment press. But while the
letter spotlighted the star’s situation to focus on the larger issue of
guardianship reform, the headlines tended to overemphasize the
celebrity angle. For example: “Republicans Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan Try to Free Britney Spears” (CBS); “Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz Joins the Fight to Free Britney Spears” (ABC affiliate WPAC); “Gaetz Joins ‘#FreeBritney’ Movement, Calls for Hearing on Conservatorships”
(Fox News). Fox News’ piece did include a video segment in which two
attorneys debated whether to end Britney’s conservatorship — but passed
on the opportunity to discuss the broader pros and cons of the system
itself.
Similarly, some media focused mainly on the “Britney vs. Jamie” angle
of this story, and her father’s reaction to the Gaetz/Jordan proposal.
Such pieces, including NBC’s, leaned pro-conservatorship and mentioned the larger issue only in passing.
Perhaps it is understandable that the press didn’t take the
congressmen’s policy proposal too seriously. Gaetz and Jordan are not
known for their social-justice credentials. And guardianship laws are
made at the state, rather than the federal, level (a point no news
outlet bothered to make).
And when allegations emerged linking Gaetz to sex trafficking, the matter dropped from the headlines.
However, legislators in Spears’ home state of California were already
in the process of working on bills that, if passed, may lead to actual
conservatorship reforms — all inspired by Framing Britney Spears.
While headlines about the bills, which appeared in late March, also
tended to overemphasize the #FreeBritney angle, the stories themselves
explained how the proposed new laws could protect the civil rights of
wards and prevent system abuse.
Assembly Bill 1194,
introduced by Assemblyman Evan Low (D-28th District), proposes special
oversight and training for conservators, imposes penalties for those who
don’t act in their ward’s best interest, and guards against conflicts
of interest.
Senate Bill 602,
by State Sen. John Laird (D-17th District) would increase the frequency
of reviews over conservatorships. And Democratic State Sen. Ben Allen’s
Senate Bill 724
— passed by the state Judiciary Committee in April and headed for a
full hearing — would allow a person subject to conservatorship to choose
their own attorney, even when their mental capacity is in question.
The Los Angeles Times’
article even pointed out that some lawyers think the bills don’t go far
enough, with one seeing a need for court reform as well and another
saying they are too focused on people like Spears and need to look at
conservatorship more “holistically.”
MSNBC’s coverage, which spanned both Gaetz’s proposed hearings and
the new state laws, featured an interview with Kathy Flaherty, Executive
Director of the Connecticut Legal Rights Project, which advocates for
low-income individuals in the mental health system. Flaherty noted that
people who struggle with mental health conditions can regain the ability
to run their lives. She explained that conservatorships are “not
necessarily to deprive someone of their rights for their entire life”
and enumerated less-encumbering alternatives for assisted
decision-making.
Lessons Learned
Clearly, Framing Britney has led to a change in the public’s
view of Spears as somehow incapacitated. And it provided news hooks for
many important and overdue conversations. It even prompted political
action on guardianship and, by extension, the rights of people with
mental illness labels. But these issues are not new. Multiple government reports and investigative article series on problems with guardianship have been published for years — the Associated Press did an exposé
as far back as 1987 — only to be forgotten. Why only now are we
starting to take both Spears’ case and guardianship abuse seriously?
Part of the change may be cultural. Greater awareness and concern
about social justice is now part of the zeitgeist — encapsulated by the
social media hashtags #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and #CriptheVote — and
may be lending more credence to the principles animating the
#FreeBritney movement and the larger questions it raises.
Also, as P. David Marshall, a professor and research chair in New
Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies at Deakin University in
Australia, wrote in The Conversation,
“A new sense of connection and responsibility to famed individuals is
emerging: where once we gawked at the public struggles of Britney, Paris
Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, now there is a more concerned response.
Audiences have become vocal supporters of the vulnerable, exploring
cultural issues in new ways….New norms are developing.”
Jessica Ford, a lecturer in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the
University of Newcastle, echoed this line of thinking in an interview
with the Sydney Morning Herald:
“It’s no longer culturally acceptable to openly ridicule someone for
mental health struggles.” Or, one might argue, to assume she needs
someone else to run her life
In the film’s aftermath, there also seems to be a realization that
when it comes to guardianship, the stories and voices of those subjected
to it matter. This side was often omitted in past coverage of Spears’
struggles, rationalized by the fact that she rarely spoke publicly about
her conservatorship — as if silence implies acquiescence. Now that she
has voiced a desire, through her lawyer, to remove her father’s power
over her life, her perspective is finally being acknowledged and even
supported. And a different picture is emerging than when the media
focused mainly on the perspective of those who sought to control her.
Last week, the BBC released its own documentary about Britney Spears’ conservatorship. According to a recent Instagram post,
the singer feels re-traumatized by such films and wonders why the media
focus on her past rather than her future. But if the last few months
are any indication, the future of her conservatorship, and the wider
topic of guardianship and the civil rights of those deemed mentally ill,
will stay in the spotlight — and that offers the possibility of real
change.
###
*Note: Per her request, Britney Spears is scheduled to address the
court directly about her conservatorship at a status hearing on June 23.
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