Britney Spears and father Jamie 'settle legal dispute', with pop star 'left to foot dad's $2m legal bill'
27 April 2024, 08:15
Britney Spears is said to have been left to foot the bill for the $2 million in legal fees her father owed from handling her money.
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The pop icon is said to have been left raging by the decision, which mostly relates to the period from 2008-2021, when she was under her father Jamie Spears' strict conservatorship.
The conservatorship, brought in after a series of high-profile personal issues, effectively left her father with complete control over her financial and personal affairs for 13 years.
Father and daughter have since been in a dispute with each other over the legal fees he paid out during the conservatorship, as well as money owed for the current case.
Jamie has been seeking to take the $2 (£1.6) million he owes to lawyers from his daughter's fortune.
A judge ruled that Britney should pay Jamie's legal fees, TMZ reported.
This has left the pop star "furious" because her own lawyer said she had a very good chance of winning the case.
In November 2021, the conservatorship was officially terminated after Jamie was removed as conservator of Britney’s estate in September of that year. Lawyer Andrew Wallet resigned as co-conservator in March 2019.
Britney described how the conservatorship affected her mental state last year.
Writing in her memoir, The Woman In Me, she said: "I became a robot. But not just a robot – a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilised that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself.
"The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
She shared: “The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time.
“It felt like I was being deprived of those good secrets of life – those fundamental supposed sins of indulgence and adventure that make us human.
“They wanted to take away that specialness and keep everything as rote as possible. It was death to my creativity as an artist.”
Britney has a net worth of about $60 million (£48 million) according to Forbes.
