Suzanne Harrington: Is Britney finally getting to tell her own story, in her own words?

The countdown is on: twenty-five years after she released her debut single, Britney Spears is about to publish her tell-all memoir.

Britney Spears' autobiography will finally tell the US pop-star's side of a story of exploitation and control

Can it really be 25 years since Britney Spears released Baby One More Time? 

Who can forget that earworm pop track with the dubious lyric “Hit me baby one more time”, performed by a 16-year-old girl in school uniform, her backing dancers also dressed as schoolgirls.

How times have changed. Or have they?

Since she began working aged 11 in 1993, for Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club, Britney Spears has spent the past 30 years making other people rich.

Singer Britney Spears and ex-husband Sam Asghari attend the World Premiere of 'Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood' on July 22, 2019, at TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, California, USA. Pic: Barry King/Alamy Live News.

Most recently, her third husband, model Sam Asghari, filed for divorce on August 16 after 14 months of marriage, citing irreconcilable differences, and who is seeking spousal support and legal costs.

“I’m a little shocked,” Spears posted on Instagram.

She has been paying her second husband, dancer Kevin Federline — they were married from 2004 to 2007 — around $40,000 a month in child support for their two teenage sons, from whom she is estranged. They live in Hawaii and she doesn’t see them.

And, for 13 years, her father controlled all of her finances; she was worth around $60 million when he took over.

Britney, 41, is the pop princess who lost everything — her freedom, her kids, her mind — and is only now regaining her identity. 

The child star who adored singing and dancing became more famous for her mental health problems and her car-crash private life than for her talent; throughout her career, she has been manipulated and controlled by those around her, from the forced annulment of her first marriage in 2004 to childhood friend Jason Alexander to the conservatorship which dominated her life from 2008 to 2021.

Britney Spears, pictured in her teenage years, as her pop star was on the ascendant.

PERSONAL QUESTIONS, PUBLIC PROPERTY

The hypersexualisation of Britney Spears began in 1992 when she was ten — a host on the US talent show Star Search said to her, “You have the most adorable, pretty eyes — do you have a boyfriend?”

In her teens, dating fellow Disney child star Justin Timberlake, the media talked about her body as though it were public property. 

Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears wave to the crowd prior to the start of the 2002 NBA All-Star game in Philadelphia, Sunday, Feb. 10, 2002. (AP Photo/Chris Gardner)

Raised in the conservative South — she was born in Mississippi and raised in Louisiana — she’d stated how she didn’t want to have sex until she was married; this led to her virginity being discussed in public, in tabloids, on television. 

Interviewers piled on, asking her personal questions about her intimate relationships, and her sex life. 

When she and Timberlake broke up in 2002, she was slut-shamed, rebuked even by senior interviewers like ABC’s Diane Sawyer, who demanded on Primetime to know what Spears had “done” to cause the breakup.

Timberlake then revealed details of their private relationship — that they’d had sex. The media salivated, and the paparazzi hounded.

Spears was, by this time, massively successful — her Baby One More Time album had reached No 1 and sold 25 million copies; at the 1999 Billboard Music Awards, she won four awards, including Female Artist of the Year and Best New Artist. In 2000, her next album Oops!... I Did It Again also reached No 1, selling a million copies in its first week.

Britney Spears performs with a snake during the finale of the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards on Thursday, Sept. 6, 2001, at New York's Metropolitan Opera House.

In 2001, her third album Britney shed her cutey-teen image; she performed at the MTV Awards draped in a giant yellow python, and two years later she was snogged by Madonna on the same stage as her fellow former Disney star Christina Aguilera looked on. 

Madonna had appeared on Spears’ fourth album, 2003’s In The Zone, which included the smash dance hit Toxic. She’d solved her family’s financial problems and was making her record company pots of money.

Yet within five years, her father had been granted legal and financial control of every aspect of her life, so that from 2008 to 2021, Spears — a rich, successful young woman who had never stopped working — had the same legal rights as a child.

Britney Spears at the MTV Video Music Awards, in 2008.

UNDER CONTROL

Conservatorships are normally applied to vulnerable elderly people, rather than pop stars who continue touring and churning out products — Spears’ extended personal lockdown resulted in the Free Britney movement started by her fans.

In 2012, the conservatorship was extended to her then fiancé, actor Jason Trawick, who was granted control over her everyday life — her food, clothing and medication — although not her money (they split after a year, Trawick signed an NDA).

So what happened? How did Spears go from Pop Star Barbie to the world’s most high-profile nervous breakdown?

She was said to be bipolar. Was she? 

Her mother Lynne wrote that she thought her daughter had post-natal depression. Or could it have been a combination of work burnout, relentless paparazzi pursuit, motherhood and divorce, piled on top of childhood trauma from witnessing all the parental fighting? Both her parents had
alcohol problems.

Britney Spears arrives at LAX from Miami after a brief visit to rehab in 2008.

Spears’ distress became very, very public in 2008 when she shaved her head and lunged at a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella. She locked herself in a bathroom with one of her children; she drove with one of them on her lap, so that her parenting was placed under the spotlight.

She was paranoid and anxious and thought her phone charger was recording her thoughts. 

She was confined to a locked ward, lost custody of her children, and was placed under the conservatorship of her father. She was banned from speaking to the media, even as she kept performing and raking in money which she was legally not allowed to spend.

Of her father’s controlling behaviour, she told the court: “He loved the control to hurt his own daughter, 100,000%.”

The details of her 13 years subjected to this control, outlined by her in court, were shocking. 

She was not, she said, allowed to remove her IUD, even though she wanted more children; she was not permitted to see friends; she was forced to take medication.

When she wanted to end her Las Vegas residency, her doctors changed her medication to lithium without her consent, a heavy mood stabiliser which left her feeling “drunk”.

She said her family did nothing to intervene or help, and her residency continued for four years.

Her management company threatened to sue her if she refused to perform.

“It was very threatening and scary,” she told the court. “The only similar thing to this is called sex trafficking.”

Britney Spears supporters Dustin Strand, left, and Kiki Norberto, both of Phoenix, hold signs outside a court hearing concerning the pop singer's conservatorship at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse, Thursday, Feb. 11, 2021, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

FREEDOM AND THE NEXT STEPS

A court finally granted her freedom from the conservatorship in November 2021, and a trio of documentaries followed: Framing Britney Spears (New York Times), Britney vs. Spears (Netflix) and Controlling Britney Spears (Sky), as well as a CNN special, Toxic: Britney Spears’ Battle for Freedom. 

Her fans had been protesting in the streets, waving ‘Free Britney’ placards.

What’s most extraordinary in all of this isn’t the avaricious relatives keen to control the cash cow; it isn’t the management people or the doctors complicit in this control; it’s the legal system which allowed it to carry on for so long.

The infantilisation and exploitation of a wealthy artist because she was deemed unfit to look after her own affairs.

Would it have happened to a male pop star?

And what now?

Will she exact her revenge on her family, whom she has referred to as “the enemy right in front of me”?

The front cover of Britney Spears' memoir The Woman In Me.

Her memoir, The Woman In Me, comes out later this month. She is planning a musical comeback to Las Vegas, following the July release of a track collaborating with Will.I.Am, fittingly titled Mind Your Business.

Whatever happens next, let’s hope it’s on Britney’s terms.

• The Woman in Me by Britney Spears is out on October 24.