As the scrutiny of the conservatorship over his daughter Britney Spears reached Congress this week, Jamie Spears has pushed back again on the storm of criticism the arrangement has garnered in recent months. After claiming that her client “saved Britney’s life,” lawyer Vivian L. Thoreen is now suggesting that, over the course of the last 13 years, the pop star could have asked to have her conservatorship ended at “any time” and simply hasn’t.
In a statement to People, Thoreen said, “From the beginning, the court has closely monitored Britney’s situation, including through annual accountings and in-depth reviews and recommendations from a highly experienced and dedicated court investigator who annually meets at length with Britney and all involved in her conservatorship.” She continued, “Britney’s Conservatorship of the Estate was comanaged by a private professional fiduciary and her father until early 2019. At that time, Britney requested in court papers that her father be the sole conservator of her estate. Her Conservatorship of the Person is not managed by her father but by a private professional fiduciary, and is similarly subject to the scrutiny of interviews, audits, and detailed reports to the judge by the court investigator.”
However, while the singer may have requested to have her father installed as sole conservator in 2019, Britney requested in a court filing last summer that Jamie be replaced as conservator with her longtime care manager, Jodi Montgomery, and that a financial institution be put in charge of her estate. In early February, she was granted the right to make that latter demand a reality after her father’s objection to installing Bessemer Trust—a wealth management and investment advisory firm—as co-conservator of her estate was overruled. Britney’s attorney Samuel D. Ingham III also previously stated during a hearing that the singer “is afraid of her father. She will not perform again if her father is in charge of her career,” going on to say that she and her father had not spoken in quite a while. In legal documents filed last August, Ingham also wrote that Britney “is strongly opposed to having [Jamie] return as conservator of her person.”
Thoreen went on to say in the statement to People that the elder Spears has “diligently and professionally carried out his duties as one of Britney’s conservators, and his love for his daughter and dedication to protecting her is clearly apparent to the court. Any time Britney wants to end her conservatorship, she can ask her lawyer to file a petition to terminate it; she has always had this right but in 13 years has never exercised it.” The attorney then reiterated a message she previously delivered almost verbatim on Good Morning America following the explosive New York Times documentary on the pop star, saying, “Britney knows that her daddy loves her, and that he will be there for her whenever and if she needs him, just as he always has been—conservatorship or not.”
The statement from Jamie’s legal counsel came a day after Republican representatives Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan sent a letter to the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Jerry Nadler, proposing holding a hearing on the conservatorship process. In the letter, Gaetz cites the Spears case as perhaps one of the “most striking examples” of the failure of the current system, which he says is used to “effectively deprive individuals of personal freedoms at the behest of others through the manipulation of the courts.” The Florida congressman told Vanity Fair, “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.”
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