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Narrator (16:43)

Britney Spears counted the dots hovering in her periphery. One dozen, Two dozen. Three dozen. Maybe there were even four dozen, but she she couldn't tell for certain when they kept darting around so frantically, closing in on her against the hood of her white convertible. She didn't need to count them one by one anymore. She had played this game enough times to estimate with precision. Three dozen for sure, she concluded to herself. Britney blinked in an attempt to clear her vision. She narrowed her eyebrows and looked straight ahead, thoughts be damned. She eased her foot down on the gas pedal of the Mercedes and crept forward with hesitation. Not unlike the hesitant look plastered on Britney's face. One hand cupped over her mouth, teary eyes shielded with designer shades. The kind of look you wear when you've just been informed you've lost all visitation rights for your children. It was October 2008. Britney's sons, Sean and Jaden, were legally in the care of her ex husband, Kevin Federline. Now, as the judge just informed her in the courthouse, she was leaving. Or attempting to leave anyways. But the dots weren't having that. The dots were always there when bad news found Britney. The dots made bad news out of her, reacting to bad news photo Hungry pricks. Brittany, look this way. Brittany. Her foot slipped and pressed down harder on the gas pedal. The convertible lurched forward before she could slam on the brake. Her descent down the ramp of the parking garage lasted longer than a world tour. She eastward foot on the pedal one more time, and the speedometer crept from zero miles an hour to three. And then the screaming started. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. The horde of paparazzi finally backed off disgust and heard their faces from where they were standing. All the paths heard it. An audible crack as a tire crushed the paparazzo's foot under the weight of Britney's Mercedes. Britney saw her chance and made her ungraceful exit, peeling out into the street. The greedy photographer in question wagged his proof to a fellow cameraman, pointing out the filthy tire Mark that grazed the top of his socked foot poking out from a pair of sandals. Serves him right. I mean, what kind of man wears sandals to work anyways, right? But I digress. The guy didn't know whether to cry in pain or ecstasy. He had much more than a broken foot. He had a headline in a lawsuit against Britney Spears Jackpot in the late 2000s, Britney Spears was an industry, but covering Britney Spears, that was an empire. There was no Instagram in 2007, no TikTok. There was barely even Facebook. If the public wanted to hear about a celebrity's life, they needed newsstand staples like People. Okay, Us Weekly. Nobody was liking photos of carefully curated interior design or latte foamer. They were searching out photos of costly couture, designer drugs and sloppy penthouse parties. The kind of excess that makes the pit of your stomach feel sick. So sick you almost kinda like was an era that was before the explosion of social media and before the recession of 2008. And it prompted magazines like Us Weekly to have a weekly photo budget of $140,000. And if the staff wanted photos of the Britney Spears that week, well, let's just say they could easily exhaust that budget for only one or two photos. To be Britney Spears in Los Angeles in 2007, meant to be the most sought after, most snapped celebrity on the market, Paparazzi made a business out of Britney Spears. A business that took a piece of Britney Spears and gave it back. One exclusive photo of Britney doing literally anything came with a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars. Stills and videos of a bald Britney ramming the tip of an umbrella into the Ford Explorer of one pushy pop. You know, the one racked up close to $400,000. But by the fall of 2007, long after the day Britney took clippers to her scalp or dented that unlucky paparazzo's car, exclusive photos of Britney Spears didn't exist anymore. They didn't exist because between 30 and 45, Paparazzi followed her, her every move. Every single day. They pursued her with the hopes that she'd be willing to give it up. A real hypersexual industry term, meaning a celebrity will indulge a paparazzo and pose for a memorable photo or two. Paris Hilton gave it up all the time, but Britney, Britney was a wild card. She only gave it up some of the time and not so much. In 2007, there were regulars in the game who proudly flaunted the aptitude for ambushing Britney. There was Hollywood tv, the outlet Responsible for capturing incidents like the aforementioned foot mutilation. Then there was X17 online, a celebrity gossip site that claimed to have earned $3 million in 2007 from Britney Photos alone. A whopping one fourth of revenue from the paparazzi photos that year. One group of ape men working under the group name MBF for X17 online logged 43 man hours of stalking and shooting Britney. A leaked memo from the Associated Press even stated to staff that anything Britney does is news. They had her obituary saved in drafts at the time too. Britney Spears wanted dead or alive. Dark. Hollywood's most patient and well paid photographers practice doorsteping, a term for literally waiting outside of a celebrity's driveway or doorstep until they departed. Cops often rousted Pabst three to four times a day. At Brittany's residence, they scattered like roaches, only to circle back later for another chance at their predatory Pulitzer Prize moment. Their days spent doorstep. It could last anywhere between 12 and 14 hours. But once the a lister in question was on the move, that's when the real fun began. Fuck a stop sign. Peel through those red lights. Make that pedal go all the way down, all the way to the metal. Goddammit. Paparazzi couldn't be bothered with traffic laws because even if they did catch a ticket, the fine would pale in comparison to the money they were about to make. Their recklessness was matched only by their stamina. When it came to car chases. To catch a frame or two of Britney's behavior, paparazzi happily trailed her for up to four hours. Exhaustion was not an option. Not when a single click of a button could earn you a down payment on the house in Beverly Hills. If Britney vomited on herself in her car, if she stepped out of her convertible without a pair of panties, if she so much as walked with her dog London in her arms, they were there to document it. Another sloppy entry into Hollywood's diary paired with a snarky hypercritical caption. Often the media circus crowded Britney to the point of near blindness. Only a month prior to crushing the paparazzo's bones to bits, Britney hit a parked car on her way to pick up up some vitamins. As they trailed her convertible and jumped in front of it, Brittany dinged another car in the parking lot. And then she picked up her pills and left. The incident not only racked up a hit and run charge, but revealed that Britney was behind the wheel without a license. And that was the final fuck up in her custody battle with Kevin. But if people followed your every step, sip smoke and Shopping spree. Someone would catch you fucking up eventually plaster some sort of oops, she did it again headline on there and you've got supermarket checkout gold. A camera greeted Brittany in every direction, literally. It's a well known tactic that the paparazzi work in threes, boxing a celebrity into a triangle that they can't turn away from. The days of a virginal bubbly Britney Spears have passed. The sweet Southern belle prancing around in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform, collecting accolades, collecting fans worldwide. Why? Merely winking at risque behavior was an early odds phase. Now the public demanded a disaster daily. The paparazzi's involvement insured it. Her misery meant that there was money to be made. You can say the media wasn't always this invasive, but it was. The disrespect was always there. It just wasn't so visceral at the time. Are your breasts real? Are you a virgin? Did you Justin? Tim Timberlake? Never mind. Justin just went ahead and answered that one for you, slut. One man offered Britney $10 million for her virginity in 2000 when she was barely 18. Now, when rumors of a sex tape with Kevin Federline started spreading via Us Weekly, a judge wouldn't even hear Britney out for a case of defamation. Their logic? Britney had been disrobing in public for almost a decade now. Britney did this to herself. People, the media, the powers that be, always wanted the public to think Britney did this to herself. Whether this was an unflattering photo, an overwhelmed meltdown, or a nasty hypersexual rumor, they never mentioned the pushing, the groping, the greedy hands of the world's trashy tabloid readers. But Britney was about to fall into a new set of hands. A set of hands so greedy they wouldn't let her go. 13 years. We'll be right back after this. Word. Word. Word.

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Narrator (27:10)

Hands slapped the windows. Fists pounded on the car's hood. Fans left hand prints every time Britney's limo paused for a stop sign. She couldn't peek it much through the tinted windows, but she knew reporters had to be tagging along too, obscuring the brilliant neon of the Las Vegas strip with their own camera flashes. An empty bottle of booze rolled around the back seat and clinked against Britney's heels. For once, Britney felt grateful for the commotion. It filled the silence between her and the boy toy sharing the back seat with her, positioned an awkward few feet apart from each other. She preferred the sound of her harassment to the sound of their strained relationship. She preferred the sound of harassment to the feel of harassment, too. The limo halted at the ornate lobby of her hotel. Last stop. Britney burst through the limo door and braced for the worst. She forged ahead with every ounce of energy in her 5 foot 4 frame. But the crowd outside consumed her, swallowed her in a sea of microphones spit her up disheveled and disoriented. Her mystery man shouldered his way through the crowd by her side and got a similar smackdown, one he then passed along to a smattering of tabloids bearing Britney's face on the COVID He literally smacked them down off a nearby newsstand. Images for her face covered the floor. The mob marched right over them. Privacy was a luxury, Britney learned. So too, was personal space, luxuries that she, one of the most lucrative pop stars in the world, somehow couldn't afford. The irony made the glistening luxury of her presidential suite feel meaningless, pointless even. Once inside, Britney stormed off to the bathroom. Everyone could step the Fuck out of her way for good. The boy toy too. He launched a vase filled with exotic flowers at the wall in frustration. But Britney was already turning away. Away from him, away from fame, away from everybody. Enough. She locked herself in the bathroom and acted mechanically. Faucet on, pearly gown off, bathtub filled, step inside and sink. Sink. Blood matted in her hair from a paparazzi inflicted gash to the back of her head. The bath water turned a sickly shade of red. It didn't matter. All she needed to do was sink, sink, sink, sink. In 2003, that's how Britney Spears pictured her final unraveling. Alone, abused, entirely misunderstood. She acted out her worst fears in the video for her song Every Time, a balling ballad from her album in the Zone. Hard to believe such a downer is on the same record as Toxic, the single that solidified her name in the long term pop game. The song that proved that once Britney got past the whole not a girl, not yet a woman phase and into the totally a woman phase, she could fucking own it. But back to every time. The video hints at reincarnation for Britney Spears. The soul while Britney Spears, a celebrity, sinks to the bottom of the bathtub. And five years later, that wasn't quite how Britney Spears's life actually unraveled. She got the bathroom detail right, though. Britney was shouting through the door of her private bathroom, I'm fucking hot. No cop was going to tell her to cover up. Not today. January 2008. Britney clutched her son Jaden with a grip that was so tight it was almost painful. Her bare back rested against the bathroom door. She bounced him up and down in her lap in an attempt to soothe him in spite of the circus waiting on the other side. The police wanted her to put on a sweater. They said, keep your sweater, I'll keep my kids. How about that? The time for Britney to return her son Sean and Jaden to her ex husband, Kevin Federline, had passed hours ago. But Britney wasn't ready to give them back. Or give them up. Which is how she saw it just hours prior. Britney and Kevin stood face to face in court, staring each other down over custody of their children. Kevin had already won a request for temporary full custody of both boys. But now he was trying to make it permanent. Britney could bear the weight of almost anything. Of an alcoholic father, poverty, being pushed around by news outlets just begging her to have another. Another breakdown. But she couldn't take the idea of losing her sons forever. Not to her backup dancer ex husband, not to anybody. The thought chilled her and she pressed Jaden further into her naked chest. She knew she was supposed to give the boys back at 7pm A court appointed child monitor had even buckled Sean into his car seat ready to return to dad. That's when Britney scooped up Jaden and bolted for the bathroom. Confounded, the child monitor called the cops and then the cops invited a steady stream of additional cops as the situation and Brittany grew more agitated. She rejected their sweater even more aggressively than their attempts to retrieve Jaden. It was past 10pm now and Brittany had lost all sense of time. Her thoughts tumbled from her lips in incoherent sentences and the bathroom reeked of sweat, the air stale from hours spent enduring the police standoff. She didn't know it was 11 o' clock when the cops finally coaxed her out of the bathroom or why they coaxed her out of the bathroom, but in doing so they scooped Jaden to so called safety in the music video for every time paramedics retrieve Britney from the bathtub and wheel her limp body outside on a gurney. In real life, they strapped her to the gurney under a white sheet before they brought her outside to the ambulance. The next scene played out exactly the same as in the video. It was life imitating art imitating life flashes. Frenzy fucking disregard for the severity of the situation. Vultures. This was 2008. Britney had already righteously lashed out with her 2007 album Blackout, a tipsy burst of pop perfection meant to be played on the brink of slipping in between states of consciousness at the club and loving every second of it. Despite the fact that it was Britney's first album to not debut atop the Billboard 200, Blackout illuminated the public demand for Britney's music, not just her PR mishaps. The record sold more than 120,000 copies the day it dropped and set a new record at the time for weekly digital album downloads by a woman. Its iconic sleaze earned it a spot in the Rock and Roll hall of Fame musical archive. Blackout was peak pop perfection built on embracing life's imperfections. Britney admonished the media with edgy autotune on the album's second single, Piece of Me, and the paps let the threat roll out their lenses and accepted the challenge and their response? Give me more. Paparazzi hungrily wove their cars in between six police cruisers, an ambulance and a fire truck to climb the summit. Britney's mansion purchased post divorce. A helicopter surveyed the flight full scene, a mosaic of unwelcome guests scrambling for unflattering photos of a woman enduring a mental health crisis. An ambulance rushed Brittany to Cedars Sinai Medical center on a 5150. Hold medical speak for a person who is in danger to themselves or others as a result of a mental disorder. Individuals on a 5150 are supposed to be subject to 72 hours of involuntary psychiatric hold for treatment and evaluation. If the situation doesn't improve, it can be upgraded to a 5250, which entails up to 14 days of intensive psychiatric treatment. But Britney never got that far. Instead of 72 hours, Brittany barely lasted 24. During her brief stay, she not only temporarily lost visitation rights with her boys, but gained an unwelcome visit from Dr. Phil in her hospital room, chatting her up for material to use in his next episode. She was, as the celebrity pseudo psychologist put it, in dire need of both medical and psychological intervention. Privacy and personal space were luxuries that she had almost forgotten. Fuck this. Back to the Summit Britney went. If only she had stayed for the full 72 hours, the next decade of her life might have gone much differently. One dozen motorcycle officers, two police cruisers, two police helicopters. The team of cops moved in tandem, securing what they called the package within the safety of their human barricade. And the package, of course, was Britney Spears. The caravan forced a path down the driveway of the Summit to move the package as swiftly as possible. They lumbered down the hill with confidence. The paps scattered on command the exact same paparazzi who jammed the driveway shut for hours. Hence the extraordinary police escort. The sheer number of unwanted cars and people that evening pushed a Los Angeles city councilman to propose new legislation that would guarantee celebrities in LA a personal safety bubble of 25 yards. Their presence was that dangerous and that expensive for the city. The total cost of Britney's security for one hospital ride was $25,000. The paps crowding the driveway muttered among amongst themselves as the ambulance cruised by. So much for the suicide tip off they had received. Britney was clearly very much alive. Boohoo. But then again, if they lost Britney, who would they harass night after night, day after day? And who would bring those easy millions earned from forcing themselves into somebody else's meltdowns and mental health crises? They could consider this their chance for a jaw dropping snap. Because life at Camp Britney was about to go wrong. Radio silent January 31, 2008. Another 5150 hold for Britney. Only four weeks into the New Year. Jamie Spears, her dad, was ready to pounce. This time as police and paramedics wheeled Brittany to the UCLA Medical Center. Jamie got out a pen, a paper and old Captain Red Ass started spilling out a hodgepodge and legal jargon. He was about to file a request for a temporary conservatorship of his daughter. Hold up. The word conservatorship has been thrown around hundreds of times in the past two years, but rarely is it explained in detail. A conservatorship is a legal arrangement put into place when a person is unable to care for themselves or their finances. In some cases, conservators work on behalf of a person who is not capable of fulfilling their basic needs finding food, water, shelter, clothing. Other times, conservators control all of someone's financial assets lest a conservatee be duped into giving their money away. Jamie filed for both types. A conservatorship of Britney's person and her estate. It shouldn't be surprising that most conservatorships assist elderly people who are forgetful, gullible or generally confused. What is surprising is that Jamie Spears filed for a temporary conservatorship for his 26 year old daughter and checked off orders related to dementia placement as the reason. Jamie Spears, the man who tormented his family with his anger and alcohol problems, was asking for complete control of his adult daughter because she suffered from so called dementia like symptoms. A Superior Court commissioner placed Britney under Jamie's career via a temporary conservatorship on February 1, 2008, one day after her second mental health emergency. One day. Jamie had been waiting for this. Waiting for six weeks to be exact. His scapegoat for the situation was a man named Sam Lutfey. Sam had suspiciously squeezed himself into Britney's inner circle at a time when Britney's inner circle barely existed in 2008, she had no manager. Instead she had Sam, her quote unquote life coach. But from where Jamie was sitting, Sam was Britney's undoing. The devil perched on her shoulder, whispering nonsense in her ear at all hours. There was only room for one bad guy in Britney's life, and that was Jamie. And Sam had sway. Too much sway. A dangerous amount of sway. The kind you get from crushing pills into someone's food. They also claimed on the day of Britney's bathroom standoff that Sam informed her that Kevin called the house and stated that she could keep the boys for a few more hours. He even lived at the Summit in his own private bedroom, only two doors down from Britney's bedroom. With that privilege came his self appointed status as gatekeeper to Britney he welcomed some paparazzi inside and barricaded certain loved ones out. Sam lfe had the in and Jamie wanted him out. On February 1, 2008, Jamie Spears gained complete access to Britney. More access than Sam. More access than the 30 to 45 daily paparazzi could ever imagine. More access than Britney even had to herself. Her dad gained the ability to speak with her doctors, to examine her medical records, to okay every single person Britney worked with to inform her force around the clock security. He was a conservator of her person now and the co conservator of her estate alongside a lawyer named Andrew Wallet. That's the guy's real name, Andrew Wallet. You could say that a father decided to step back into his daughter's life to help her break a self destructing cycle of chaos. But more evidence would point towards the fact that one man saw the chance to seize control over a massive amount of talent, talent, money and celebrity. And he took it and called the situation temporary. I'm Jake Brennan and this episode of Disgraceland is to be continued. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page@gracelandpod.com if you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to Disgracelandpod.com membership members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland Ad Free. Plus you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month, weekly unscripted bonus episodes, special audio collections, and early access to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelandpod.com membership for details, rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook Disgracelandpod and on YouTube at the end at YouTube.com Disgracelandpod Rocka Rolla He's a bad bad man.

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