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Narrator
Double Elvis.
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Amazon Representative
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Amazon.comprime I think the last time I.
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Narrator
Spoke to you guys about quints, I told you about the transit quilted duffel bag that I got for my wife. Well, I got myself a Napa leather duffel bag from Quint as well. And I just used it. We used both our bags on this family trip that we took out west. I love this bag. Okay? It looks cool, it looks casual. It looks way more expensive than it is. Not that I care about that, but it just, it's good quality and you can kind of tell when you just look at it. I stuffed it with my new double brush stretch jacket from Quince. You know when you're, you're going out to dinner, it's summertime, it's too hot to wear a jacket, but you're going somewhere kind of dressy, but you don't want to wear a blazer. You're kind of in that sort of formal fashion. No man's land. That's where the double brushed stretch jacket from Quince comes into play. It dresses you up casually and smartly and you can rock it out around town as well if you're just running errands and you want to look good. This jacket is my new favorite addition to my wardrobe. And like I said it along with my go to Quince Merino all season, base tees fit perfectly in my Nappa leather duffel bag from Quints. The best part of all this, everything with quints is half the cost of similar brands. Okay? That's important. That matters. And they, they, they can do this because they work directly with top artisans. They cut out the middlemen and Quint gives you luxury pieces without the markup, so keep it classic and cool with long lasting staples from quint Go to quince.comgraceland for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U I N C E.com disgraceland to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com disgraceland this episode contains content that may be disturbing to some listeners. Please check the show notes for more information. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis the stories about Britney Spears are insane. She was once offered $10 million for her virginity at the peak of her fame, 30 to 45 predatory paparazzi followed her every move every day during 12 to 14 hour shifts. One company logged 40,000 hours of stalking her, accrued between only eight men. Her father tormented her childhood with anger and alcohol issues. And decades later, a judge granted that same man a conservatorship over Britney, his turbulent track record be damned. But despite the challenges thrust upon her between her family and a constant media frenzy, Britney Spears made great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my melotron titled Candid Camera MK2. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to Low by Flo Rida and T Pain. And why would I play you that specific slice of boots with the fur cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on February 1, 2008. And that was the day that Jamie Spears was granted a temporary conservatorship over his daughter. A temporary conservatorship that would stretch on for 13 years. On this episode, Predatory paparazzi a not so temporary conservatorship. And this is extra extra. This just in Britney Spears. I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgrace. Jamie Spears knew he had to be fast if he wanted to get away with it. His legs trembled. He could barely keep his knees from buckling. The ground swayed before him like a ship tossed around at sea. But it was the preschooler squirming in his arms that slowed him down the most. Jamie's sloppy step sunk into the Louisiana dirt as he trudged towards the car. His labored exhales cast out the odor of liquor on his breath, a sterile smell so strong that it overpowered the scent of the family crawfish boil he was leaving behind. Perhaps, just perhaps, Jamie was so hammered that afternoon that no one had bothered to see what he was up To Jamie couldn't do any harm when he was slumped on the sofa. Wasted, right? Couldn't start trouble at a lighthearted family affair centered around finger licking. Southern fare. Wrong, he could saunter off and slip behind the steering wheel. Jamie haphazardly buckled his daughter Brittany into the backseat. And at no more than five years old, Brittany already knew better than to ask questions. She was all too familiar with her family's routine. Daddy drinks, Daddy picks on mama. Daddy and mama fight until they run out of breath. Brittany runs off to her on Shonda's trailer until the screaming stops. Until her own internal terrified screaming stops. Returns home. Don't complain about the mystery meat on your plate and go on with your business. Jamie slammed the door on Britney's doe eyed expression in the back seat. Muscle memory helped him get behind the wheel. He slumped in the front seat and aimlessly jabbed the side of the steering wheel with his keys. Where was the goddamn ignition? Jamie was so wasted he swore he saw an arm reach inside and knock the keys from the ignition. And the arm spoke to him in a familiar southern drawl. Asked him if he was out of his mind and how much he had to drink. Or was that Willie, his brother? It was Willie. It was all real. Like a reflex. Jamie slugged the face attached to that arm right in the face. And the blow bowled Willie over. Jamie wobbled out of the front seat of the car, rolled up his sleeves. A full on family feud broke out and each brother had the same question. What the fuck do you think you're doing? Britney, still secured in the back seat, had a front row view of what her family did best. Knock down, drag out fights. She kicked and wailed trying to flag down a family member before someone lost a tooth or Britney lost any more of her childhood innocence. Just as Jamie raised his fist to hit Willie one more time, her mother Lynn scampered over to break up the brawl. After all, she was used to putting an end to fights with Jamie. She did it all the time. In the 80s and 90s, life with Jamie Spears was not stable. Not when he cheated on Lynn in their own trailer. Not when he changed careers from welder to chef to small business owner. Not when he was pounding drinks and picking fights with his own family saying Lynn was surely too stupid to have finished her hard earned college degree. The Spears didn't nickname him Captain Redass for nothing. But just as Britney saw nothing out of the ordinary when she watched her parents marriage dissolve argument by argument, Jamie didn't see the dysfunction either. He came from his own busted childhood, stained by the day he matured from boy to man when his mother left the house one afternoon and never returned. Instead, they found her corpse in a cemetery, bled out just a few feet above the final resting place of her infant son, Austin Wayne. A shotgun wrested by one barefoot was used to pull the trigger. It was the kind of scene that could really fuck up not just one family, but two. As a result, Jamie was an unstable man, passing trauma from one generation to the next, floating through a sleepy, hard working but equally unstable town called Kentwood. With a population of barely more than 2,000 people, the town rests 90 miles north of New Orleans, a rural contrast to the extravagance of the Big Easy. Kentwood's median annual income is only half of the national median, and the Spears weren't exactly raking it in themselves. Lynn brought home a modest school teacher's wage, while Jamie dedicated himself to a venture he called Total Fitness by Jamie, a quote unquote health spa built in a barn near the Spears residence. More accurately, he owned a gym with a hot tub and a steam room and charged members $300 a month. The luxury of the concept was novel at first, but interest in Kentwood's new spa eventually tapered off. Neighbors were no longer paying up to kick back, and Jamie grabbed his gun and resorted to dire measures to provide for his family. When the fridge was empty in the Spears household, the food on the table was rabbit. When there wasn't rabbit, squirrel would do, all freshly caught, skinned and cooked in the Spear's backyard. Britney never questioned that either. She knew much of her family's income was funneled into the dance and gymnastics lessons she enjoyed so much. She had a hunch her mother enjoyed the lessons as well. Bringing out the child star and Britney was Lynn's final attempt to make the Spears a happy family. Like a flimsy band aid slapped over a shotgun wound, the endless classes calmed some of the chaos in the Spears household. Better yet, they removed Britney from the house so she wouldn't have to remove herself when Lynn and Jamie inevitably broke into nasty bouts of fighting. But the lessons did more than get Britney out of the house. It put her on stages, on screens. She made her debut on Star search at age 10, belting the old Judd's tune Love Can Build a Bridge. With remote, remarkable maturity, she was an understudy for a role in the Off Broadway show Ruthless. As a preteen, Britney sailed closer to stardom when she was selected as one of the seven new recruits for the hit Disney Channel show the Mickey mouse club in 1993, and Britney fought for that spot twice. Agents adored her during her first audition, but ultimately passed when they realized she was only eight years old. The second time, she beat out 20,000 other children for her spot as a Mouseketeer, working long days in Orlando, Florida. Of the seven recruits in 1993, four would ascend to superstardom. Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Ryan Gosling, and of course, Britney herself. But in the mid-90s, no one would have guessed that Britney Spears would be the child star to come out on top. Especially when the Mickey Mouse Club said, see you real soon for the final time in 1994 and stopped filming new episodes. When Britney returned to Kentwood, things were not the same. They were worse. When the Mickey Mouse Club ended, so did Britney's weekly $1,000 paychecks. The same checks that were helping keep squirrels and rabbits off their dinner plates. There was also a new mouth to feed. In addition to big brother Brian, who was three years older than Britney, little sister Jamie Lynn was born when Brittany was nine and a half. Employees at the health spa went unpaid. The family's Ford Probe was repoed. Phone lines were cut. Total fitness by Jamie collapsed. Eventually, Jamie was filing for bankruptcy. But he wasn't sweating it too hard. Jamie knew Britney was about to come through for the Spears family again. His teenage daughter just inked a development deal with Jive Records to pivot from silver screen to pure pop star. Jive Records, the home base of NSync, a tribe called Quest and Aaliyah, aka the big ones. My daughter's going to be so rich, she's going to buy me a boat, he told the senior director of marketing at Jive. At the moment, Jamie's financial woes were the last thing on his mind. Britney was about to go big. Way big. He could smell it. The COVID of Rolling Stone, a single topping the Billboard Hot. 110 million copies sold worldwide. An American bubblegum teen dream come true. She even had a hit single already in the can. Hit me again. Or something like that. TLC didn't want it. The Backstreet Boys didn't want it. But Britney seized the opportunity and flew all the way to Sweden to recording. Jamie might not have known much about show business, but he knew for damn sure that record labels didn't fly nobodies halfway around the world. His daughter was going to be a star, and he was gonna get that fucking bo. I love my kids. I spoil the crap out of them. But until I started using Monarch Money and used their budgeting app. And I actually sat down and I was actually going through what I was spending that I realized how much I was spending on garbage that my kids frankly don't need. They've got this whole complete financial command center for everything. I mean, it's not just for what I'm spending, It's for what I'm saving. It's for what I'm investing in. It's for what my goals are, my family's goals. But now that I have this financial command center, I can integrate my kids savings accounts as well. And I can clearly show them what we're spending money on and I can show them how much money they have and how quickly that would go down to zero if they were to be spending $70 on a Lego box on a whim, you know, something they're going to use for, I don't know, 90 minutes before they forget about it for the rest of their lives. But of course, Monarch Money does so much more than that. You can easily get a hold of your personal finances. You can become your own personal cfo. Like I said, this whole financial command center that's part of their budgeting app is fantastic. It's going to give you visibility and control into what you're spending, into what you're saving. It's going to help you earn more and start growing. Highly recommend Monarch. Start managing your finances to build the life you actually want. Guys, without a clear financial picture, financial dreams are just that. They're just dreams, okay? And they can feel out of reach. And Monarch makes managing money simple even if you're super busy. Especially if you're super busy. All right. Monarch Money, the budgeting app that I'm talking about. Over a million households are using it. It was named Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Get control of your overall finances with Monarch Money. Use code disgraceland@monimalmoney.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% of your first year@monatormoney.com with code DISGRACELAND. Hey, discos, if you want more Disgraceland, be sure to listen every Thursday to our weekly after party bonus episode where we dig deeper into the stories we tell in our full weekly episodes. In these after party bonus episodes, we dive into your voicemails and texts, emails and DMs and discuss your thoughts on the wild lives and behavior of the artists and entertainers that we're all obsessed with. So leave me a message at 617-90-66638 disgracelandpodgmail.com orisgracelandpod on the socials and join the conversation every Thursday in our afterparty bonus episode.
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Narrator
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
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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