Britney Spears Says She “Didn’t Deserve” Her Conservatorship Treatment

Britney Spears is looking back at her 13-year conservatorship. In an excerpt from her upcoming memoir, The Woman In Me, published by People on Oct. 19, Spears said she “didn’t deserve” to be put under a conservatorship and admitted that she feels “sick” thinking about it now.

“13 years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself,” she writes. “I think back now on my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for that long and it makes me feel sick.”

Spears went on to compare her situation to the behavior of other famous people who did not have legal restrictions placed on their lives. “Think of how many male artists gambled all their money away; how many had substance abuse or mental health issues,” she says. “No one tried to take away their control over their bodies and money. I didn’t deserve what my family did to me.”

Details On Spears’ Conservatorship

The singer was placed under a conservatorship in 2008, with her father, Jamie Spears, acting as her conservator. This meant that Spears’ financial and business decisions all had to be approved by Jamie first.

Spears started speaking out against her conservatorship publicly in 2021, calling the arrangement “abusive” in a bombshell court testimony. As part of her court battle, Spears claimed that her father set multiple restrictions on her, including allegedly forcing her to wear an IUD to prevent her from having another child.

Jamie was removed as her conservator in September 2021, before the conservatorship was terminated two months later.

Spears Says She Felt Like A Child

In separate excerpts from The Woman In Me, Spears said living under the conservatorship often made her feel like a child, because she didn’t have the same rights that most adults do.

“This is what’s hard to explain, how quickly I could vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom,” she writes. “There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl; but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult.”

However, that specific feeling ended up inspiring her book’s title. “The woman in me was pushed down for a long time,” she writes.

Surviving Her Father’s Criticism

Spears also speaks about how she was treated by her father, from childhood to her conservatorship, saying that Jamie called her “fat” while he acted as her conservator.

“If I thought getting criticized about my body in the press was bad, it hurt even more from my own father,” she writes. “He repeatedly told me I looked fat and that I was going to have to do something about it.”

Their strained relationship dates back to her youth, where Spears remembers her father allegedly telling her she was “never good enough” as a child. “He’d drummed that message into me as a girl,” she writes. “And even after I’d accomplished so much, he was continuing to do that to me.”