Britney Spears is looking back on her 13-year career as a conservator. In an excerpt from her upcoming memoir, "The Woman Inside Me, " published by People magazine on Oct. 19, Spears said she "didn't deserve" to be placed in conservatorship and admitted that she now gets upset just thinking about it. Nausea".
“Thirteen years later I feel like a shadow of myself,” she wrote. "I now look back on the long-term control my father and his associates had over my body and my money, and it makes me sick."
Spears went on to compare her situation to the behavior of other celebrities who live outside the confines of the law. "Think about how many male artists gamble away their money; how many have substance abuse or mental health issues," she said. "No one is trying to take away control of their own body and money. I don't deserve what my family did to me."
Spears conservatorship details
The singer was placed under conservatorship in 2008, with her father, Jamie Spears, serving as her conservator. This means that Spears' financial and business decisions all have to be approved by Jamie first.
In 2021, Spears began speaking out against her conservatorship, calling the arrangement "abusive" in an explosive court testimony. As part of the court battle, Spears claimed her father placed multiple restrictions on her, including allegedly forcing her to wear an IUD to prevent her from having another child.
Jamie was relieved of his duties as conservator in September 2021 and his conservatorship ended two months later.
Spears says she feels like a child
In a separate excerpt from "The Woman In Me," Spears said living under conservatorship often made her feel like a child because she didn't have the same rights as most adults.
"It's hard to explain because they took away my freedom and I quickly bounced between being a little girl, a teenager and a woman," she wrote. "There was no way to act like an adult because they wouldn't treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl; but then my adult self would come back - it's just that my world wouldn't Allow me to be an adult."
However, this particular feeling ultimately inspired the title of her book. “The woman within me was suppressed for a long time,” she wrote.
Withstand father's criticism
Spears also spoke about how her father treated her from childhood to her conservatorship, saying Jamie called her "fatty" when he was her conservator.
"If I thought it was bad that the media was criticizing my body, it hurt my dad even more," she wrote. "He told me repeatedly that I looked fat and that I had to do something about it."
Their strained relationship dates back to her youth, with Spears remembering her father allegedly telling her that as a child she would "never be good enough." "As a girl, he instilled this message in me," she wrote. "Even after I had accomplished so much, he continued to do this to me."
