A wild video of Britney Spears complaining about her conservatorship has resurfaced online three years after it came to an end.
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While appearing on The Jonathan Ross Show in 2016, Britney Spears opened up about the conservatorship. The pop icon was placed under a conservatorship on Feb. 1, 2008, after there were concerns about her mental health. This was after she had famously shaved her and attacked a paparazzi’s car with an umbrella.
As she discussed her album, Glory, Spears mentioned the conservatorship, complaining the legal arrangement had made the “creative process” for the record more difficult.
“The new album, you are more involved in this musically, I understand, than previous ones?” Ross asked. “So you’ve taken control. You’re more in control of your music than before? Why did it take you so long? Why did you wait ’til now to do it?”
Spears responded, “Well, um, there’s a lot of reasons, but I won’t get into the whole story.”
Ross pointed out to Spears that the audience knew “a lot” about her history, including her mental health woes in the mid-2000s. That was when she spilled all the details.
“Since the conservatorship,” Britney Spears began. “I felt like a lot of the things were planned for me to do and, you know, being told what to do. And I was just like, for this [album], I want to make it my baby, and I want to do it myself, and I was very strategic about the way I did it, and, um, yeah, that’s why it means so much to me.”
Ross then asked her if she was “happy” and in a “good place,” to which she replied, “Yes, sir.”
Immediately after the show, Spears’ team had the show edit out the comments.
The conservatorship ended on Nov. 12, 2021.
Britney Spears Reflected on ‘The Jonathan Ross Show’ Interview in Her 2023 Memoir ‘The Woman in Me’
In her 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me, Britney Spears wrote about discussing her conservatorship while appearing on The Jonathan Ross Show.
“I even mentioned the conservatorship on a talk show in 2016,” she wrote. “But somehow, that part of the interview didn’t make it to the air. Huh. How interesting.”
Spears then wrote about how the conservatorship turned her into “sort of” a “child robot.”
I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself,” Spears penned. “The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
Britney pointed out that the financial arrangement made her feel like a “shadow” of herself. She would go through feeling like a little girl, a teenager, and woman constantly.
“Because of the way [her conservators] had robbed me of my freedom,” she stated. “There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl; but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult.”
Her father, Jamie Spears, was infamously known as one of the conversators.