Britney Spears, in her incendiary public testimony on June 23, detailed several claims against the conservatorship that has kept her under the control of her father, Jamie Spears, for 13 years—alleging forced birth control, emotional abuse and more. But one strand of her story hit fans particularly hard: her allegation that she’d been coerced into performing, and even overmedicated on lithium when she told her management she wanted to end her popular Las Vegas residency. Her management, Spears said, made it clear they could sue her in 2018 if she didn’t perform all of the concerts for which they’d scheduled her. “It was very threatening and scary,” she said. “The only similar thing to this is called sex trafficking.”
As a fan, it’s hard not to feel a stab of sickening guilt and complicity at this statement. Although fans didn’t know it at the time, Spears’ freedom disintegrated, bit by bit, every time someone bought Britney concert tickets—to her hundreds of tour performances and hundreds more Las Vegas residency performances—since the conservatorship began in 2008.
Spears’ complaints about forced work focused on her tours and residency, not recording her albums during this period: 2008’s Circus, 2011’s Femme Fatale, 2013’s Britney Jean and 2016’s Glory, which have collectively notched 3 million equivalent album units in the U.S. to date, according to MRC Data.
Perhaps that’s because live performance is so lucrative: Her Piece of Me residency alone made nearly $138 million, on top of hundreds of millions worldwide for 2009’s The Circus Starring Britney Spears and 2011’s Femme Fatale. Of course, millions of people who love Spears bought tickets to those shows, which can spark an existential fandom crisis: Were we complicit all along?
It was easy, for many years, to feel just fine about loving and supporting Spears’ work. The initial flurry of media coverage when the conservatorship began made it seem like the arrangement was temporary and in her best interest, coming on the heels of her much-publicized 2007 difficulties that were branded a breakdown: her public head-shaving and an attack on paparazzi with an umbrella. As the years passed, the conservatorship faded from public discussion. Spears continued to crank out great, successful pop tunes — including four Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s — and fans followed along, thrilled at every chance they got to see her live.
The secrecy surrounding Spears’ conservatorship, and particularly the social media posts that presented her life as generally happy, made it impossible to know what was happening to Spears in private. There was little cause to believe that supporting Spears with concert ticket sales could actually hurt her. Spears herself said as much in her testimony: “I’ve lied and told the whole world ‘I’m OK and I’m happy.’ It’s a lie. I thought I just maybe if I said that enough maybe I might become happy, because I’ve been in denial.”
Since even before the conservatorship, Spears has attracted a unique brand of fandom: concern fandom. While other stars inspire legions of haters or, in the case of Taylor Swift, acolytes who will follow even arcane insider-y masters disputes, Spears has long activated fans’ protective impulses. As her life publicly unraveled in 2007, a group set up a MySpace page urging a boycott of her then-new album Blackout with the stated aim of urging her record company to get her help: “They can see she’s in pain, and they don’t care,” an organizer told E! Entertainment at the time. Their official slogan, echoing the popular-at-the-time show Heroes‘ catchphrase: “Save the pop star, save the world.”
By 2009, the FreeBritney movement was born on FreeBritney.net in direct reaction to the conservatorship. The site’s current mission statement lays out the argument still wending its way through the courts now: If she’s too incapacitated to make her own decisions, why has she been capable of recording multiple albums and touring the world making millions? “During the twelve years of Spears’ conservatorship she has repeatedly toured the world, released multiple albums, and worked on a variety of television shows,” it said. “Her conservators decide whether or not she works, as she cannot enter into contracts for herself because she is legally not her own person. Britney Spears needs permission from her conservators to leave her house or spend any of her own money.”
The #FreeBritney movement grew as a group of fans began to get particularly suspicious about what was happening to Spears in 2019 when she canceled a second announced Las Vegas residency, Domination, attributing the move publicly to her father’s emergency surgery for a ruptured colon. Odd occurrences snowballed and spilled into public view: TMZ reported that she’d been checked into a mental health facility and the podcast Britney’s Gram reported that they’d received an anonymous tip claiming she’d been checked in against her will. The #FreeBritney movement gained momentum and mainstream notoriety, poring over her Instagram posts looking for coded clues and staging marches in Los Angeles to agitate for her freedom.
The fandom itself was divided: Many who loved Spears felt the movement was intrusive, assuming it knew better than she did. It seemed, on its face, like conspiracy theory-driven fandom. But their cause went mainstream with the help of the recent documentary Framing Britney Spears, produced by The New York Times, and their support appears to have emboldened Spears to speak out publicly for the first time with her claims of serious abuse. This has led to intense and rightfully serious coverage of the case from many major news reporters, including The New Yorker‘s investigative star, Ronan Farrow, along with Jia Tolentino. There are now widespread calls for changes to state and federal law to prevent such abuses from the likes of The Nation‘s Elie Mystal, in addition to agitation to liberate Spears herself.
In the end, astonishingly, the #FreeBritney cause may end up helping to push for real change.
Spears’ situation is a wholly unique confluence of circumstances: The reason she could be exploited this way for this long is because she has such loyal fans; if no one cared about her or her work anymore, she wouldn’t be exploitable. Now, her fans may well end up helping to save her—though the bravery and significance of her speaking out cannot be underestimated.
On the other hand, Spears’ testimony also left rank-and-file fans—those not at the forefront of the #FreeBritney movement—to wrestle with retroactive guilt for all those ticket and merch purchases, and even for doubting the #FreeBritney movement itself. “I’m having a really hard time reconciling my relationship to her music and her artistry, especially post-2008, because I now worry that I helped fund something that maybe she was under duress when she was making,” said Bradley Stern, co-host of the It’s Britney, Bitch! podcast, during an episode on Spears’ testimony. He continued: “It is a gross feeling. We’ve spent thousands of dollars on merchandise, tours, flights, tickets, on the Britney brand.” Spears herself, of course, did not imply that her followers should feel any guilt—in fact, the day after testifying, she apologized to fans via Instagram for “pretending like I’ve been OK the past two years,” because, Spears wrote, she “was embarrassed to share what happened to me.” But that doesn’t stop the fan guilt from bubbling up anyway.
There’s another source of fan guilt, too: the longing to see her perform again, even with everything we now know. Spears herself teased the Domination residency that never happened as an incidental side note of her testimony: She explained that she was directing and choreographing most of the show herself and had taught the choreography to her 16 dancers. “I wasn’t good,” she said. “I was great.” There’s plenty of video online that backs up her claim—that she was, indeed, great in those rehearsals, the Britney Spears we have loved for 22 years now.
She has said via her lawyer that she won’t perform anymore as long as she’s under her father’s conservatorship. There have also been reports that she wants to retire no matter what. Either option is her right, but it’s hard, as a fan, not to wish for a day when we can witness her greatness again on stage. That said, it’s even more important that the next time we do—if ever—it’s on her own terms.
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