Britney Spears’ fans have reportedly become so convinced that her conservatorship is exploiting her that they’ve started sending violent death threats to members of the team who manage it. According to reporting from Entertainment Tonight , law enforcement officials have had to intervene, an indication that things may have become very serious.
Although they’d been spread online for several years, rumors that Britney’s conservatorship has been swindling her recently started getting mainstream attention around the time that the “Baby One More Time” singer checked into a mental health facility in April.
As Vulture reports, the fears about Britney’s well-being were also stoked by an episode of the podcast Britney’s Gram, which cited past stories and allegations about the dealings of the conservatorship and appeared to conclude that all was not well. They aired a voicemail from a man who claimed to be a paralegal who worked on the conservatorship agreement which said, in part, that “What is happening is disturbing, to say the least.”
He went on to allege that Britney had been preparing for her now-canceled Las Vegas residency when she began to buck against the rules of the conservatorship and stopped taking her medication. The anonymous tipster claims that this caused Britney’s dad, Jamie Spears, to send her to the mental health facility, using his illness as a cover story for the press. He also said that Spears’ conservatorship was supposed to have come to an end in 2009 after the Circus era and that she had a “meltdown” when she wasn’t released from it.
These rumors and more triggered the creation of the “#FreeBritney” movement online, but its adherents’ efforts aren’t restricted to social media. They’ve held in-person protests as well. One of those took place outside of West Hollywood City Hall on April 22, Billboard reports. According to a photo published by The Dope University , Britney fans carried signs that read “Truth Will Set Her Free” and “Britney’s Management Is Toxic,” among others.
Britney has previously responded to the rumors on Instagram. In a post from April, she asked fans not to believe everything that they read and heard about her. In the caption, she implied that her former manager Sam Lutfi was behind all of the rumors coming out. She has since been granted a permanent restraining order against him, People reports.
“All is well. My family has been going through a lot of stress and anxiety lately and I just needed time to deal,” she said in the video on her Instagram page. “But don’t worry. I’ll be back really soon.”
