Is it time to free Britney?
Well, she finally got her day in
court talking about
the conservatorship that she has
been under for 13 years.
And some of what she revealed was
pretty crazy.
So we're going to give you
a bit of this.
She said I've been in denial.
I've been in shock.
I'm traumatized.
I just want my life back.
And so she gives an idea of what
the conditions have been like that
she's been living under.
She recalled one incident in which
she didn't want to do an additional
run of shows in Las Vegas.
She felt relieved when her handlers
said she didn't have to do
the shows anymore, but suspected
that there would be consequences.
Days later, she said her therapist
told her that he had heard
that she was being uncooperative.
He then took her off her
regular meds and
put her on a lithium regimen.
She said it was a strong drug,
you can go mentally impaired if you
stay in it longer than five months.
I felt drunk.
I couldn't even have a conversation
with my mom or dad about anything.
They had me with six different
nurses.
She talked about how she had to do
an overwhelming number
of therapy sessions.
She talks about how under
the conservatorship, she's not able
to get married or have a baby.
She says I have an IUD inside of
myself right now so
I don't get pregnant.
I wanted to take it out so
I could have another baby, but
the so called team won't let me
go to the doctor to take it
out because they don't want me to
have children, any more children.
I need your help,
she told the judge, I just don't
want to be sat in a room for hours
a day like they did to me before.
They made it even worse for me.
There's a lot more,
perhaps we'll get into some of it.
But Dan,
she is describing obviously
horrible conditions that she
apparently up until very recently
didn't even know that she could go
to court to try to appeal this.
Which seems to imply that her legal
representation very clearly doesn't
have her best interests at heart.
So what are your thoughts?
>> Yeah, you're absolutely right to
it again there.
First of all my thoughts are, yes,
we got John to talk
about a music story.
Hell yeah.
[LAUGH] >> And
then my second thought is,
yeah with Britney Spears,
there's levels to this, right?
So not only are there the things
that are happening to her, but
there was controversy even
surrounding the documentary that
made a lot of people more recently
aware of the situation with Britney
Spears and her conservatorship.
Which Britney Spears actually
responded to fairly recently saying
that documentary,
herself was really triggering and
traumatizing because of a lot
of things that have happened to her
underneath the situation.
I mean, it was real and brutal, but
it's a lot going on there.
And so what you have here is
a woman who through celebrity and
fame, it's just like sort of being
tormented through a lot of it.
And you see this a lot even
contemporarily in music where
you have very young artists like
their folks, like Juice Wrld and
Lil Peep who died because of job
drug overdoses, right?
And their handlers are all around
them in the studio while they
are making all these songs about
drugs and all these other things.
And they are very much like, well,
he is continuing to make
the songs and
we are making money off of that, so
were not going to stop him and his
use usage or anything like that.
And then they overdose and die,
then people wonder, no,
what has happened?
How could this have
possibly happen?
There is a stand in the music
industry where once there's a cash
cow somewhere, that people around
they're not interested in the well
being of that person's generally.
It's the well being of,
how can you sustain this cash cow?
How do you sustain this product for
this business, right?
And so it's very clear that
Britney Spears was on the other end
of that, and I think maybe you'll
possibly get to this in a moment.
The media at that time is very
much not helpful in that either.
>> Yeah, that is totally true.
I mean, she has been abused.
This is one form of abuse for
13 years, but
her entire life obviously.
And I have no doubt that if she
gets free of it,
tons of grifters will find some way
to strip her of basically
all the money that she has.
And they apparently had been quite
successful with this because their
references, and I talked to
my producers about this morning.
About her $16 million fortune, how
does Britney Spears have only a $16
million fortune?
She's been a superstar for
literally decades.
Somebody has the money that
she made.
But anyway, sorry,
what was the aspect of this you
wanted to focus on?
>> There's an aspect of this where
the media was not really helpful
of what this is about.
>> Sure, sure, sure, yes.
Well, and by the way,
people have been pointing out
the hypocrisy recently.
Was it Perez Hilton who's like.
>> Yeah.
>> Yes, she finally gets her
day in court.
And it's like, dude, wait, do you
forget everything that you've
literally ever said about her and
use your profile to make people
think about her?
You contributed to the media
environment that the people who
are trying to financially control
her use to get that control.
And he's hardly the only person
obviously, there's more to it than
that, which I'm sure, Dan, you can
probably say a lot more about.
>> Yeah, Perez Hilton saying that
is rich because you have this other
media ecosystem that it's gotten in
some ways better over the years.
But obviously, just like in
politics, the most salacious stuff,
the drama filled things, that gets
the engagement and all the metrics
that people who run these kind of
businesses care about.
And so they continue doing
these stories.
Perez Hilton, back in the MySpace
days, was the original grifter
of celebrity gossip and drama.
And so, and then a lot of it off
of Britney Spears.
Perez Hilton got his capital as far
as professionally and definitely
got money off of publicly doing
these, just awful newsstand gossip
type articles about Britney Spears.
And so, I think it's really rich
from that to be coming out
where he's continuing to say,
finally she gets her day in
court without any sort of.
It'd be fine if Perez Hilton had
previously done a statement saying
I regret a lot of the things I did
and I'm going to change the way in
which I do music reporting.
But he didn't do that,
a lot of people who do music
reporting is garbage.
That's why I do the audio
face podcast,
where we do music reporting in
a really smart way that's fair and
kind of just and moral sometimes.
>> Yeah, so we'll see if this
changes the situation.
There's been a lot of media
attention on it.
Maybe that will do something.
And by the way, I say all this as,
am I technically a fan of hers or
her music?
I have no vested interest.
I just think, at some point,
can people just leave her alone?
Seriously, I understand that's
a throwback or whatever, but
hasn't she been through enough at
this point?
And that's fully accepting that
whatever comes next is probably
going to be its own unique hell,
but maybe she can at least get
a different hell after 13
years of this.
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