'Free Britney Spears': chronicle of the teenager who became a pop icon and now lives under the tutelage of her father
The documentary 'Framing Britney Spears' analyzes the ups and downs of the artist's career, which she has spent 13 years under the personal and financial tutelage of her father despite generating thousands of dollars
Several people in shorts, sneakers and short-sleeved T-shirts decisively cross a park that leads to the Los Angeles courthouse while waving white and pink cards with the same message that they chant loudly: "Free Britney." Like so many other things, the movement to demand the legal freedom of Britney Spears, whose personal, work and financial life her father has controlled for more than 13 years, began as a campaign on social networks that, seen from the outside, seemed like a freak thing. : a group of fanatics who spread a kind of unfair conspiracy theory against their idol.
But time, and several court hearings to suspend that parental control, has ended up putting a good part of public opinion on her side. The demand for her under the hashtag #FreeBritney has appeared in recent months due to the high part of trends on Twitter. The definitive accolade has been given to him by The New York Times newspaper with the production of the documentary 'Framing Britney Spears', which premiered in Spain last Monday, and which collects testimonies from lawyers specialized in guardianship, executives who promoted Spears in his early years and his former assistant and personal friend Felicia Culotta. During the hour and a quarter that the film lasts, a question arises: How is it possible that a 39-year-old woman, who works and generates hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, cannot make her own decisions?
To try to answer that question, you have to start at the beginning. An exercise that the documentary tries to carry out and in which, through statements, mainly in favor of the Free Britney cause, the media are pointed out as responsible for its decline. Neither the artist's father, nor her ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake seem to come off very well.
During her childhood, and supported mainly by her mother, Lynne Spears, the young woman had left her hometown in Louisiana and had already participated in the Mickey Mouse Club children's program. But her ultimate success came in 1998, when Britney Spears released her debut album. The first video clip of her, just 16 years old, showed her as a schoolgirl with a shirt tied over her navel and an open skirt. A hypersexualized teenager that all the young women wanted to look like. Baby one more time. "Girls want to be grown-ups at that age, but they are girls," recalls Kim Kaiman, the executive who helped build Britney's image in her early years: young and innocent, sexy and in her underwear. In the personal sphere, says the marketing expert, she was a "serious and focused" girl, far removed from the image that she would project a few years later.
In 1999, Spears began dating Justin Timberlake. In those years boy bands were triumphant and he was the star of one of them, N Sync. The two became the fashionable couple in America: young, handsome, and successful. Until the courtship ended in 2002. If until then one of the most recurring topics of conversation had been Britney's virginity, from there, and spurred on by Justin, who set about stoking his ex-girlfriend with vexatious innuendoes and even with a song, the American media made it their punching ball.
In an interview on ABC, Spears had to face the question that an entire country was asking: "You have broken his heart. You have done something that has caused him a lot of damage, what have you done to him?" Nobody considered that relationships end and that there does not have to be a bad guy. Much less that the breakup was Timberlake's fault. Paradoxically, a couple of weeks ago Timberlake publicly apologized to Britney Spears and Janet Jackson for her macho behavior towards them. Their reputations plummeted after they crossed paths: the first, after her comments after the breakup, and the second, when, during her joint performance at the 2004 SuperBowl, he uncovered her breast.
The apologies, with which Timberlake gets his pat on the back, come 20 years later and at a socially auspicious time for Britney Spears' side. But they do not erase the artist's fall from grace in the early 2000s. As the documentary shows, everything she did about her interested her, especially if she could criticize it. Especially if she went wrong. The wife of the, then, governor of Maryland went so far as to say that she would shoot him "if she had the opportunity" for the message she was transmitting to the young women.
Up to a million dollars per photo
"When she had her first child, everyone wanted a piece of Britney," explains the director of photography for US Weekly magazine between 2001 and 2011, Brittain Stone, who confesses in the documentary that every week he paid millions of dollars for photographs of the artist. Public opinion began to evaluate her role as her mother. "Is Britney a bad mother?" A journalist told her in another television interview in which she continued the derision until the woman burst into tears. The high price she paid for her photographs, of up to a million dollars, caused the paparazzi to start an all-out war for the best worst photo of the pop princess.
In the middle of Spears' battle with her ex Kevin Federline for the custody of their two children, the award went to the photographer Danny Ramos, who tells how he obtained the famous image of the shaved young woman attacking him with an umbrella that ended up going around the world . According to her account, that night Britney had gone to see her children at the house of her ex-partner, who she did not allow him to enter. When the paparazzi found her at a gas station, he questioned her until she reacted. "It wasn't a good night for her, but it was a good night for us," she brags looking at the camera.
"My daughter will buy me a boat"
In 2007 Spears released Blackout, considered her best album. But she was already the public joke. On television shows like '1, 2, 3' they played at listing what she had lost in those years. A macabre joke that mentioned her hair, her children or her mental health. It is at that moment, according to the work of The New York Times, when her father, Jamie Spears, who at least publicly had not been present in her daughter's career, enters the scene. "She didn't seem to have much of a presence in her life. Her mother was the one who supported her," Kaiman explains about the singer's early days: "The only thing Jamie told me was that her daughter was going to be so rich that she I would buy a boat. "
In the midst of entrances and exits to different mental health centers, a court decided in 2008 to give custody of the singer to her father, a legal figure that serves to protect people who are not in full capacity or who cannot help themselves. by themselves. The expert guardianship attorney Adam Streissand, whom Spears hired for that process, assures that she did not object to a person controlling her finances, but she "wanted someone independent and professional." The statements of the documentary give wings to the theory that she accepted that supervision due to the fear of not being able to see her children. Finally, the judge did not allow Streissand to represent her, based on a report whose content is unknown. "We don't know what we don't know," says the expert.
What is known is what happened thereafter. Britney Spears has released four more albums; in 2009 she went on the world tour of The Circus; in 2011 the Femme Fatale Tour; from 2013 to 2018 she initiated and extended her residency in Las Vegas, for which she pocketed around $ 350,000 per concert; and she has starred in different advertising campaigns; as well as other concerts. According to Forbes magazine, the current fortune of the Toxic interpreter would be around 60 million dollars - almost 50 million euros - of which she cannot freely dispose or manage. A figure that, according to this same medium, is very far from that of other figures with more or less similar repercussions.
The singer, who has not been involved in any scandal in recent years, has halted her work activity since the beginning of 2019. In her social networks, she explained that she was "taking time to learn and be a normal person." but many have seen it as a pulse for their father to stop controlling his finances. Something that will not happen, at least, until September 2021, although in November 2020 a judge appointed the financial Bessemer Trust as the second tutor for Spears' economy.
With Britney's father in the spotlight after the premiere of Framing Britney Spears, her lawyer has stepped up to defend her client: "I understand that in every story there has to be a villain, but people are making mistakes. He rescued her daughter from a situation where her life was in danger, people hurt her and exploited her. Jamie saved her, "said Vivian Thoreen in an interview with ABC News.
Meanwhile, the singer has started receiving public displays of support from different personalities. One of the last has been that of Miley Cyrus during the concert that she gave before the SuperBowl this year. The fans, for her part, have spent months carrying out an exhaustive scrutiny of Britney's social networks, in which, they say, the singer leaves hidden messages asking for her freedom. Whether it's true or not, some of these posts leave little room for her imagination: "I'm a Sagittarius, I love freedom, I love independence, and I don't like being tied down."
