Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino Investigate Britney Spears’s Conservatorship

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 3 July 2021

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

Britney Spears has been one of the world’s most prominent pop stars since her début, in the late nineteen-nineties. But, since 2008, she’s been under a court-ordered conservatorship—a form of legal guardianship—which has restricted nearly all aspects of her life. Details about the arrangement have been kept out of public view, all while Spears has continued to turn out records and perform lucrative shows, earning millions of dollars for those around her. But the pop star is now directly confronting the people and structures that have ruled her life for the past decade. In recent court testimony, Spears openly detailed her experience under the conservatorship for the first time. She demanded her liberty and expressed her anger, profound sadness, and frustration. She even alleged that her conservatorship, which is led by her father, prevented her from getting an IUD removed from her body, which the family denies. The staff writers Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino have investigated how Spears wound up in this situation, in the article “Britney Spears’s Conservatorship Nightmare.” They speak with David Remnick about Spears’s life under relentless public scrutiny, her cultural significance, and the thorny legal problems posed by conservatorships. “Conservatorships essentially deem someone incapacitated,” Tolentino says. “And from that point, because they do remove your rights by necessity, they sort of foreclose the possibility of proving or gaining capacity to anyone under it.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:08.8	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:12.3	Brittany Spears has been one of the biggest pop stars on Earth since her debut in the late 90s.
0:18.3	But since 2008, she's been under a court-ordered conservatorship, a form of
0:23.0	legal guardianship that has strictly controlled the details of her personal and family life,
0:28.8	her finances, her career, even her birth control. Details about the arrangement have long
0:34.6	been kept out of public view, all while Spiris has continued to turn out records and perform lucrative shows earning millions of dollars for others around her. But Spears and her lawyers are now mounting a challenge to end her conservatorship, inspiring the long-standing slogan, Free Brittany. In recent court testimony, we heard Britney Spears detail her experience under that conservatorship,
0:59.9	and she demanded her liberty in tones that ranged from outrage to sadness to deepest frustration.
1:07.3	She even alleged that her conservatorship, which is led by her father, prevented her from getting an IUD removed from her body.
1:15.2	The New Yorkers Ronan Farrow and Gia Tolentino have now written a long and deeply reported piece explaining Brittany's story and its cultural significance.
1:25.6	Welcome, Ronan and Gia. It's good to talk to you.
1:28.1	Thanks, David.
1:28.7	Thank you.
1:29.6	Now, Gia, for a certain generation, I think you and Ronan fit into it.
1:35.0	Brittany Spears was an explosive presence on the pop cultural scene.
1:39.0	So explain that for the rest of us why she is so important and still is.
1:43.5	So I think for people, you know, maybe within
1:45.5	10 years of the age that Ronan and I are, you hear this sort of three-beat opening shot of
1:52.1	baby one more time. And you remember this time, you know, in 1999, where one day you had never heard of Britney Spears
2:02.1	and the next day, she was this sort of white, hot, molten center of American pop culture in a way
2:08.3	that really nobody but Madonna was, you know, before her and nobody, but Beyonce has been since.
2:14.9	Mm-hmm.
	...

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