Pop singer Britney Spears claims she’s been forced to wear an IUD against her will – @CatSzeltner ‘Speaks Out’ against forced contraception. pic.twitter.com/V0sfpSxDfz
— EWTN Pro-Life Weekly (@EWTNProLife) July 6, 2021
One thing is clear, when you read the long, sad (but buzz-worthy) feature in The New Yorker entitled “Britney Spears’s Conservatorship Nightmare.”
Britney is a celebrity.
When she goes to court, she is a celebrity. When she escapes to a pub, she is a celebrity. When she fights to see her children, she is a celebrity. When she has a nervous breakdown (especially in public), she is a celebrity.
If and when she ever returns to church (there are rumors), she will do so as a celebrity. Ditto for any return to celebrity friendly Kabbalah classes.
But you get what you expect in this feature, written by Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino. There’s a huge cast of characters, some who speak on the record and some who do not. There are waves of details from court documents and testimony. There’s an endless survey of public scenes and paparazzi chases.
But the second line of the double-decker headline points to the heart of the story: “How the pop star’s father and a team of lawyers seized control of her life — and have held on to it for thirteen years.”
This is a story about a fight between a Baptist father (simply “Jamie” in most of the story) and his wild daughter — who has lived her entire teen and adult life in the glare of a media spotlight that burned her, even as it poured wealth on everyone around her, including members of her immediate family.
What about faith issues? There are fleeting glimpses of religion “ghosts” throughout this story. However, there is evidence that The New Yorker team realizes that, behind all of the talk about Britney’s mental health, the father and daughter are fighting about the moral choices she has made in her private life. Meanwhile, the daughter keeps trying to break free from this noose, in part through sex, love, marriage and children.
Consider the implications of this passage, referring to the legal drama that pulled the #FreeBritney social-media world back into the headlines:
At one point during the hearing, Spears said that the conservatorship had denied her reproductive rights. “I was told right now, in the conservatorship, I’m not able to get married or have a baby,” Spears said. “I have an IUD inside of myself right now, so I don’t get pregnant. I wanted to take the IUD out, so I could start trying to have another baby, but the so-called team won’t let me go to the doctor to take it out, because they don’t want me to have any more children.” It was a startling allegation, but it was not entirely new. In October, 2020, a makeup artist named Maxi, who is close to Asghari, Spears’s boyfriend, said, on a podcast, that Spears’s conservators had the final say about who Spears’s friends were, whether or not she could get married, and whether or not she could have a baby. “We’re talking about some ‘Handmaid’s Tale’-type things,” Maxi said.
What is her father’s (second-hand) response, as a Baptist?
(When contacted for comment, one of Jamie’s representatives declined to answer specific questions but characterized his behavior as that of a loving father saving his daughter from possible ruin. The representative, who repeatedly referred to Jamie as “daddy,” objected to the idea that Jamie, as a churchgoer, would have anything to do with an IUD.)
One of the only Britney-quote religious references in the story comes at the end of another discussion of sex, marriage and motherhood.
This fling made headlines, of course. But it’s clear that, to the celebrity herself, the goal here was clear — a child. Why?
In the spring of 2004, Spears met a dancer named Kevin Federline at a night club, and they were married within six months. Spears initially did not secure a prenuptial agreement, which prompted panic in her family. A considerable fortune was at stake. “Lynne lost her mind,” Butcher, the family friend, recalled. “They weren’t gonna allow the wedding to be made legal.” The marriage contract wasn’t signed until the month after the ceremony, when Federline legally agreed to limit his stake in Spears’s estate. But Spears seemed thrilled, and commissioned a photo shoot in which she dressed up as a French maid and served drinks to Federline, who wore a trucker hat, cargo shorts, and flip-flops. Spears wanted a family. “I’ve had a career since I was 16, have traveled around the world & back and even kissed Madonna!” she wrote on her Web site, two months after getting married. “The only thing I haven’t done so far is experience the closest thing to God and that’s having a baby. I can’t wait!”
Spears’s first son, Sean Preston, was born ten months after the wedding.
Farrow and Tolentino serve up a dizzying number of characters. large roles and bit players, in this drama. It’s hard, at times, to keep all of the names straight. Clearly, Britney and her keepers live complicated lives.
However, I thought it was interesting that one of the few clear references to religious faith was linked to one of the professional handlers that the superstar’s family has employed in an attempt to keep her life under control.
Spot the ties that bind in this passage?
Jamie had become close to Lou Taylor, a business manager who shares the Spears family’s Christian faith and whose husband is a pastor at an evangelical church. Taylor later raised the possibility of putting Lindsay Lohan under a conservatorship, according to Lohan’s father; in a recent interview, Courtney Love said that Taylor tried to wrest control over her family’s estate. (In a statement, Charles Harder, a lawyer representing Taylor, said, “At no time did Ms. Taylor ever make any effort to put anyone into a conservatorship. Not Britney Spears. Not Lindsay Lohan. Not Courtney Love.”) Taylor, sources present at the time said, began attempting to contact Spears, efforts that Spears rebuffed.
Here is a crucial follow-up to that evangelical connection, right at the moment when a conservatorship looms on the immediate horizon.
A conservatorship “seemed like an impossible dream at that point. …” Jamie planned to file papers on January 22nd, but then Taylor “felt God leading them to wait, fast, and pray, despite the frustration of a phalanx of lawyers. …”
If readers are paying attention, it’s really clear that — inside Britney’s family — there is a sense that God is on their side in this morality play.
However, the story never explores the implications of all of that.
It would helped, of course, to have addressed the role that Christian faith, Baptist and otherwise, has played in this woman’s life. What beliefs were left intact? Did anyone seek input from Britney on that question, looking back over the oceans of material about her in the public record?
In one chatty piece at Newsweek, it’s clear that Britney’s fans frequently ask her about her relationship with God. Here is the response:
“You guys have been asking me more questions in the comments and I’m here to answer all of them,” she says. “I grew up Baptist,” she says. “But I studied Kabbalah so I go back and forth — but I do believe there is a god.”
Then again, there is also this:
Spears wrote about ending practicing Kabbalah on her website back in 2006. Per People, she wrote: “I no longer study Kaballah, my baby is my religion.”
Does any of this matter?
I guess that depends on whether Britney, in some sense, remains an actual person, with beliefs and rights of her own. Or is she just a celebrity and that is that?
FIRST IMAGE: Snapshot from the Legendary Miss Britney Spears fan page on Facebook. The caption: “Always take time to go to church even on vacation.”
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