From the ACLU, this is at Liberty. I'm Kendall Seesmeyer, your host.

On October 24th, Brittany Spears released her tell-all memoir, The Woman in Me. In the book, she traces her journey from child stardom

to living 13 years under the control of a conservatorship, a court-sanctioned arrangement that

strips people with disabilities of their civil liberties. Now, in Brittany's case, her dad,

who she characterizes in the book as an addict and an absent and sometimes abusive

father, was able to gain legal rights over her life and her business, beginning when Brittany

was just 26 years old, forcing her to work surveilling and controlling her daily life habits

and making all of her health care choices for her.

Brittany's conservatorship initially made global headlines in 2021,

catapulting conservatorship as a legal construct into public dialogue,

and calling into question its use in the lives of more than one million other Americans with disabilities.

Brittany's success in terminating her conservatorship also propelled the state of California to sign meaningful legislation into law,

requiring courts to consider alternatives to conservatorship and making it easier for others to terminate their own.

So today we're checking in with Zoe Brennan Crone, who I originally spoke to back in 2021 when this case first made headlines. Zoe's a staff attorney with the ACLU's Disability Rights

Project, and she's worked on conservatorship cases for many years, including filing amicus briefs

in support of Britney Spears. We've both read the memoir and now we're ready to

discuss. So with that, Zoe, welcome back to At Liberty and thank you so much for joining us again.

Thank you, Kendall. It's great to be here. Okay. So we both read the book. I want to start our

conversation with a broader theme, I think, that was really prevalent in the book, I want to start our conversation with a broader theme, I think, that was really

prevalent in the book, which is that Brittany and other women family members before her,

like her grandmother, Jean Spears, were consistently pathologized for mental health struggles,

in particular those relating to losing pregnancies, children,

...