Britney Spears Gets Her Voice Back

Britney Spears’ heartbreaking testimony shows the importance of letting mentally ill people speak for themselves.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle
#FreeBritney protesters. Their signs are very pink.
It takes thousands of people screaming for Britney before Britney herself can be heard at all. Photo from Ringo Chiu on Shutterstock.

At the end of the day, no matter how much I thought I knew about Britney Spears, I couldn’t understand how much pain she was in until I heard her tell her own story.

I’ve been writing about Britney Spears for a long time. My first book, Trainwreck, was about how women are demonized and dehumanized by the media, which sets them up so that we can always have someone to tear down. As you can imagine, Britney was a major part of the book. What I learned about her, back in 2014 and 2015, is what everybody seems to know now: She is much smarter than she’s given credit for. She is keenly aware of the ways capitalism and misogyny have combined to destroy her life. She probably does have a form of mental illness that requires treatment, and that illness has served as a pretext for her to be held prisoner, for over ten years, by a father she’s described as abusive whenever she is free to speak.

The gruesomeness of Britney Spears’ “conservatorship,” nominally established so that her father could keep her from hurting herself, was revealed in full by her court testimony on Wednesday. Spears said that her father “loved” the control he had over her, and that he…

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Jude Ellison S. Doyle

Author of “Trainwreck” (Melville House, ‘16) and “Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers” (Melville House, ‘19). Columns published far and wide across the Internet.