Britney Spears Learned About #FreeBritney From a Nurse at a Rehab Facility
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Britney Spears said a nurse at a rehab facility she was forced to enter as part of her conservatorship was the first person to show her evidence of the burgeoning #FreeBritney movement, per an excerpt from her upcoming memoir, The Woman in Me, shared by The New York Times.
Spears said she placed in the $60,000-per-month facility in Beverly Hills after she started pushing back against the conservatorship, and fighting with her father about it, near the end of 2018. “My father said that if I didn’t go, then I’d have to go to court, and I’d be embarrassed,” Spears wrote, saying Jamie also threatened to make her look like an “idiot.”
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At the facility, Spears said she was “locked up against my will,” unable to go outside or drive her car, and forced to give blood weekly. “I couldn’t take a bath in private,” she added. “I couldn’t shut the door to my room.” She also had little connection to the outside world, saying the facility only allowed her to watch one hour of television before 9 p.m. each night.
Nevertheless, Spears said, a nurse at the facility took the chance to show her clips of the #FreeBritney movement and the growing discussion about her conservatorship. “That was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my life,” Spears said. “I don’t think people knew how much the #FreeBritney movement meant to me, especially in the beginning.”
Even still, as the movement gained traction, Spears admitted that she found herself torn between the support and the invasiveness of some of the coverage. Spears previously expressed her reservations and displeasure with the various documentaries made about her during this time, and in the book she said, “Seeing the documentaries about me was rough. I understand that everyone’s heart was in the right place, but I was hurt that some old friend spoke to filmmakers without consulting me first… There was so much guessing about what I must have thought or felt.”
Additionally, Spears wrote about the start of the conservatorship in early 2008. While acknowledging that she “had been acting wild” around that time, Spears declared “there was nothing I’d done that justified their treating me like a bank robber. Nothing that justified upending my entire life.”
She went on to speak about the intense scrutiny, control, and hypocrisies that defined the arrangement: “Too sick to choose my own boyfriend and yet somehow healthy enough to appear on sitcoms and morning shows, and to perform for thousands of people in a different part of the world every week.”
Spears also did not hold back when discussing her father, Jamie, saying she “began to think that he saw me as put on the earth for no other reason than to help their cash flow.” She even recalled Jamie saying at one point, “I’m Britney Spears now.”
While Spears successfully got a judge to terminate her conservatorship in 2021 — she writes that she was at a resort in Tahiti when she got the news — the all-encompassing toll of the arrangement still lingers. “Migraines are just one part of the physical and emotional damage I have now that I’m out of the conservatorship,” she said. “I don’t think my family understands the real damage that they did.”
Numerous other details from The Woman in Me have leaked out ahead of the book’s publication next week, Oct. 24. These include details from Spears about her party girl days and her “drug of choice,” Adderall; as well as a few bombshells about her relationship with Justin Timberlake, including the fact that Spears, at 19, became pregnant with Timberlake’s child and chose to have an abortion.
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