It's today explained, and today, February 12, 2021, just in Timberlake publicly apologized

to Britney Spears, even though their relationship ended like 20 years ago.

The apology has a lot less to do with their bygone romance and much more to do with a reckoning

over how this country treats its famous young women and Britney Spears has gone from something

of a villain in this story to something much more closely resembling a hero.

The free Britney movement deserves much of the credit for that transformation.

It's a fan-driven campaign which hopes to liberate Britney from her conservatorship.

Constance Grady has been covering free Britney for Vox.

So a conservatorship is a legal solution for what happens if you're an adult, but you

can't make decisions for your life in your best interests.

So this is something that is used if you have a mental health condition or a brain injury

or maybe you're older and you're developing dementia and you're unable to care for yourself.

So a court will assign someone to do that for you.

So Britney went under conservatorship in 2008 and under the terms of her conservatorship,

she's not in control of her finances or her business or her personal life.

So for about two years now, going back actually to the point that the conservatorship was set

in place in 2008, but most intensely for the past two years and especially now since

the release of the new documentary, Framing Britney Spears, fans have been speculating

that the conservatorship has left Britney Spears as a prisoner in her life and that she

might need to be rescued.

Okay, well let's go back to 2008 and talk about why Britney Spears was placed under this

conservatorship.

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