Britney Spears reveals all the ways she secretly rebelled against her conservatorship
Long before the #FreeBritney movement began, Britney Spears was secretly fighting back against her conservatorship in creative ways.
In the pop superstar's new tell-all memoir, The Woman in Me (out now), Spears, 41, reveals how she quietly rebelled against the conservatorship through which her father controlled her life for nearly 14 years. Her first act of defiance, she says, was dancing awkwardly on stage during her Las Vegas residency to make sure she didn't move her hair — because she knew it would upset her team.
"As performers, we girls have our hair," Spears writes. "That's the real thing guys want to see. They love to see the long hair move. They want you to thrash it. If your hair's moving, they can believe you're having a good time. In the most demoralizing moments of my Las Vegas residency, I wore tight wigs, and I'd dance in a way where I wouldn't move a hair on my head. Everyone who was making money off me wanted me to move my hair, and I knew it — so I did everything but that."
Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic Britney Spears
Spears was proud of her small form of rebellion at the time, but looking back on it, she realized she hurt her own spirit more. "I realize how much of myself I withheld onstage, how much by trying to punish the people who held me captive I punished everyone else, too — including my loyal fans, including myself," she writes. "But now I know why I'd been sleepwalking through so much of the past thirteen years. I was traumatized. By holding back onstage, I was trying to rebel in some way, even if I was the only one who knew that was what was happening. And so I didn't toss my hair or flirt. I did the moves and I sang the notes, but I didn't put the fire behind it that I had in the past. Toning down my energy onstage was my own version of a factory slowdown."
Another form of rebellion took place on social media, where Spears began to take back her agency through seemingly innocuous posts.
"The first step toward securing my freedom was for people to begin to understand that I was still a real person — and I knew that I could do that by sharing more of my life on social media," she writes. "I started trying on new clothes and modeling them on Instagram. I found it incredibly fun. Even though some people online thought it was odd, I didn't care. When you've been sexualized your whole life, it feels good to be in complete control of the wardrobe and the camera."
While many people didn't understand the inspiration for those "odd" posts, Spears was finally getting a taste of freedom by making them.
"There were so many people in the industry at that time thinking that I was out of my mind," she writes. "At a certain point, I'd rather be 'crazy' and able to make what I want than 'a good sport' and doing what everyone tells me to do without being able to actually express myself. And on Instagram, I wanted to show that I existed."
Gallery Books 'The Woman in Me,' by Britney Spears
With these small but significant actions, Spears resisted the constraints she faced for years — until June 2021, when she called 911 to report her father for conservatorship abuse, kickstarting the legal battle that ultimately won her freedom.
The conservatorship had begun in February 2008, when Spears was 26. Following her highly publicized breakdown in late 2007 and early 2008, her father, Jamie Spears, filed for a conservatorship over his daughter's person and estate. What was ostensibly meant to be a temporary measure lasted for more than a decade, during which time the pop star released four albums, went on two concert tours, served as a judge on The X Factor, and performed the wildly popular Piece of Me residency in Las Vegas.
Despite her high creative output and the income it generated, Spears was not free to make meaningful decisions regarding her career, personal life, health, or finances on her own until she was finally able to deliver explosive testimony alleging a slew of abuses by her father and the conservatorship team.
Spears' conservatorship was terminated in November 2021, and her memoir marks a first step in celebrating her hard-won freedom by telling her story in her own words.
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