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Who Wronged Britney Spears? Ben Appel

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Britney Spears greets fans at a ceremony honoring her with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on November 17, 2003. (Vince Bucci via Getty Images)

For anyone who was alive in 2007, her memoir The Woman in Me is a catharsis. We finally get to read, in Britney Spears’ own words, just what the hell happened all those years ago, when the pop star appeared to have lost her mind.

For the #FreeBritney movement, the autobiography reads like vindication. In the book, Spears credits her die-hard fans specifically for turning the tide of public opinion about the conservatorship, which they framed as a ploy by her conservators—especially by her father, Jamie Spears—to seize total control of the cash cow. In November 2021, five months after Spears delivered a searing, 23-minute-long public testimony detailing the anguish the legal arrangement had caused her, it finally came to an end.

Since then, Spears has stayed out of the limelight, except on Instagram, where she posts videos, often captioned with nonsensical musings, in which she dances barefoot in her living room. In September, a jig she performed with a pair of large kitchen knives launched a thousand memes and left some wondering about Spears’ mental health. 

Despite the bizarre videos, the narrative persists that Spears is just fine, she was always just fine, and her family and the state of California should never be forgiven for stripping her of her freedom for 13 years. But as Spears herself writes of that time in the early aughts: “I know now that I was displaying just about every symptom of perinatal depression: sadness, anxiety, fatigue.” 

In other words, it probably was mental illness. 

It makes sense. Spears’ oldest son, Sean Preston, was only three months old when, at the age of 24, she got pregnant with her second son, Jayden James. The back-to-back pregnancies were hard on her body; her hormones were all over the place. Meanwhile, her marriage to Kevin Federline was unraveling. “Again and again in my life I’ve seen fame and money ruin people, and I saw it happen with Kevin in slow motion,” writes Spears. Jayden was still a newborn when Spears filed for divorce in November 2006.

On her own with two babies, Spears became obsessed with shielding her sons from the paparazzi. “Enemy combatants,” she calls them, and they seemed to multiply in number after each birth. Simply traveling to and from the recording studio “felt like being part of a military operation.” Spears was terrified.

Reeling from her breakup, and with Paris Hilton on her arm, Spears went through her “party stage.” She didn’t have a drinking problem, she assures us, but she admits to abusing Adderall, the amphetamine typically prescribed to treat ADHD. She says it worked like an antidepressant. 

It is precisely halfway through the book when Spears writes about her drug use. If The Woman in Me were a novel, this would be the part where the protagonist becomes what’s called an “unreliable narrator.”

Amphetamines are powerful drugs. In mentally stable individuals, they can induce careless, erratic behavior. In a young woman suffering from “severe postpartum depression,” it can cause manic, perhaps even psychotic, episodes—that is, periods of delusion, impulsiveness, paranoia, euphoria, and irritation. Recalling the media coverage of that time—the shaved head, the pink wigs, the faux-British accent, the rage—it’s difficult not to conclude that Spears was as unwell as we had feared.

But coming to this conclusion requires reading between the lines. Spears admits she spiraled, that she got “weird” and felt “confused.” But The Woman in Me is ultimately her attempt to convince us that her behavior was never so crazy as to warrant what followed—the 13-year-long conservatorship, which put her father, Jamie Spears, in complete control of her life, including what she ate and whom she dated. 

In the end, one wonders if her father’s intervention might have saved the pop star’s life.

Sam Lutfi and Britney Spears leaving Petco November 17, 2007, in Los Angeles, California. (Chris Wolf via Getty Images)

Spears writes that she started hanging out with some shady characters in 2007, to distract her from her family’s constant scrutiny. Her mom, Lynne, was always trying to make Spears feel like she was “bad or guilty of something,” she writes. Her parents didn’t seem to think she “was worth much.”

I don’t think Spears is being dishonest here. But I suspect Jamie and Lynne’s scrutiny of their daughter had more to do with their concern about her mental state than with her moral fiber. An irrational person is impossible to reason with. Attempts to do so can come across as antagonistic and hostile, when in reality it is just frustration and fear.

I know this firsthand. Five years before Spears’ very public meltdown, I had my own spiral with amphetamines. Depressed and anxious, I binged on speed and became psychotic. I had to be hospitalized four times over the course of a year, my worried-sick family calling the shots. Between trips to the psych ward, I’d rapidly cycle from indignant to remorseful to euphoric. My frustrated mother felt helpless.

In one telling section of the book, Spears writes of a night shortly after she got out of the hospital and began dating a paparazzo, Adnan Ghalib. They tore all over town with the press in constant pursuit. She describes a day they were driving near a cliff, when suddenly she “decided to pull a 360.” They nearly careered over the edge. “I felt so alive,” Spears writes. Ah, the euphoria of psychosis.

Spears writes that if she had just been left alone, she knows she would have come out the other side, eventually. But reading her book, it’s clear there were times when she was a danger to herself and to others. And she writes more than once that she wondered if her family were actually “trying to kill” her. As imperfect as they are—and Spears’ book gives numerous examples of their errors—I don’t think they were ever homicidal, nor do I think it was rational for Spears to fear that they were.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault, whom I hold responsible for the postmodern hellscape we find ourselves in, theorized that the state’s efforts to improve the health of its populations are not inspired by benevolence but rather by a desire to keep the workers working. To Foucault, even reason itself was ultimately about power; the state, he contended, justifies its own conception of reality by removing from society whomever it deems insane. “Reason,” he once said, “is what gives itself the right and the means to set aside madness.”

Spears fans, and anyone else whose life perspective hinges upon tidy narratives about money-grubbing white men and the innocent women they exploit, will take the pop star at every outrageous word. Their belief systems require it. Otherwise, they’d have to acknowledge the gray area of this murky spectacle and consider the possibility that perhaps they’d gotten it all wrong. That perhaps Spears isn’t a victim of state overreach but instead a success story of state intervention. That maybe her family really does care about her well-being. 

At the end of the day, objective reality exists. People living in delusion cannot safely coexist with rational members of society. Sometimes family, friends, and yes, even the state need to step in. I shudder to think where I’d be if I’d refused rehabilitation and remained a stubborn, misunderstood victim. Nothing about the process was fun, but it did restore me to sanity.

All of this is not to say that the conservatorship needed to last for as long as it did, nor in the manner that it did. Aspects of the legal arrangement were downright Orwellian. “I became a robot,” she writes. “I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself.” Talk about dehumanizing.

And yet, Spears is still alive. In December, she’ll turn 42. She hasn’t irreparably harmed herself or anyone else. That’s certainly something the #FreeBritney brigade should celebrate.

Supporters of the #FreeBritney movement rally in support of musician Britney Spears for a conservatorship court hearing outside the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in Los Angeles, California, on November 12, 2021. (Patrick T. Fallon via Getty Images)

Since its release on October 24, The Woman in Me has reportedly sold nearly 2.5 million copies worldwide. It’s been reported that many A-listers, including Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and Reese Witherspoon, are vying for production rights. Apart from a few callous remarks about Spears’ questionable mental health, Hollywood appears to be pretty united in its stance that Britney is only a victim, and her family is only evil. 

Time will tell if any of them will give Britney the nuanced treatment she deserves. I am not optimistic. 

Ben Appel is a writer living in New York. His memoir, with Bombardier Books, is forthcoming. 

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Seven Objects—And What They Say About the Election The Editors

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The Trump Bible, Kamala’s coconut tree, and J.D. Vance’s couch. The Free Press nominates symbols that sum up this insane race.

(All images via Getty, illustration by The Free Press)

The most physically imposing picture of Donald Trump is the one he almost didn’t survive. You’ve seen it: The former president stands silhouetted against the sky, fist pumped, jaw jutted, bright red blood streaked across his face like war paint. The blood is from a bullet that missed its mark; the blood means that Trump should be dead, but isn’t. He’s still standing, all six-plus feet and 200 pounds of him, in the flesh, as corporeal as it gets.

In the wake of the assassination attempt, many commentators declared the election over. That raised fist, that frayed ear, the way Trump’s top teeth bore down on his lower lip as he shouted his defiance: It was powerful. It was undeniable. You’d never see Joe Biden standing up like that after taking a bullet in front of a crowd of thousands.

(Evan Vucci via AP)

The image of Trump was symbolic, iconic, and instantly viral. Within 24 hours, it had appeared on the front page of virtually every newspaper in the world—by which time millions of people had made it their social media avatars and memed it into oblivion. It adorned miniskirts, coffee cups, and balaclavas; supporters displayed it in their homes and tattooed it onto their bodies. Most importantly, the assassination attempt caused a bump for Trump in swing states; if he wins the presidency, it will be at least in part because of that photograph.

But while that image of Trump may be the most powerful symbol of this insane race, it’s not the only one. Like the coconut emoji that became synonymous with Kamala Harris’s campaign. Or the cats beloved by liberal women (or, allegedly, eaten by immigrant hordes). These and more have been nominated by our staff as symbols of the 2024 election. Read on for the list of (mostly) inanimate objects that we’ll never see the same way again. —The Editors


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November 2, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

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November 3, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

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I’m home tonight to stay for a bit, after being on the road for thirteen months and traveling through 32 states. I am beyond tired but profoundly grateful for the chance to meet so many wonderful people and for the welcome you have given me to your towns and your homes.

I know people are on edge, and there is maybe one last thing I can offer before this election. Every place I stopped, worried people asked me how I have maintained a sense of hope through the past fraught years. The answer—inevitably for me, I suppose—is in our history.

If you had been alive in 1853, you would have thought the elite enslavers had become America’s rulers. They were only a small minority of the U.S. population, but by controlling the Democratic Party, they had managed to take control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They used that power to stop the northerners who wanted the government to clear the rivers and harbors of snags, for example, or to fund public colleges for ordinary people, from getting any such legislation through Congress. But at least they could not use the government to spread their system of human enslavement across the country, because the much larger population in the North held control of the House of Representatives. 

Then in 1854, with the help of Democratic president Franklin Pierce, elite enslavers pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through the House. That law overturned the Missouri Compromise that had kept Black enslavement out of the American West since 1820. Because the Constitution guarantees the protection of property—and enslaved Americans were considered property—the expansion of slavery into those territories would mean the new states there would become slave states. Their representatives would work together with those of the southern slave states to outvote the northern free labor advocates in Congress. Together, they would make enslavement national. 

America would become a slaveholding nation. 

Enslavers were quite clear that this was their goal. 

South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explicitly rejected “as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal.’” He explained to his Senate colleagues that the world was made up of two classes of people. The “Mudsills” were dull drudges whose work produced the food and products that made society function. On them rested the superior class of people, who took the capital the mudsills produced and used it to move the economy, and even civilization itself, forward. The world could not survive without the inferior mudsills, but the superior class had the right—and even the duty—to rule over them. 

But that’s not how it played out. 

As soon as it became clear that Congress would pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Representative Israel Washburn of Maine called a meeting of thirty congressmen in Washington, D.C., to figure out how they could fight back against the Slave Power that had commandeered the government to spread the South’s system of human enslavement. The men met in the rooms of Representative Edward Dickinson of Massachusetts—whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poems—and while they came to the meeting from all different political parties, often bitterly divided over specific policies, they left with one sole purpose: to stop the overthrow of American democracy.

The men scattered back to their homes across the North for the summer, sharing their conviction that a new party must rise to stand against the Slave Power. They found “anti-Nebraska” sentiment sweeping their towns; a young lawyer from Illinois later recalled how ordinary people came together: “[W]e rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.” In the next set of midterm elections, those calling themselves “anti-Nebraska” candidates swept into both national and state office across the North, and by 1856, opponents of the Slave Power had become a new political party: the Republicans. 

But the game wasn’t over. In 1857, the Supreme Court tried to take away Republicans’ power to stop the spread of slavery to the West by declaring in the infamous Dred Scott decision that Congress had no power to legislate in the territories. This made the Missouri Compromise that had kept enslavement out of the land above Missouri unconstitutional. The next day, Republican editor of the New York Tribune Horace Greeley wrote that the decision was “entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.”

By 1858 the party had a new rising star, the young lawyer from Illinois who had talked about everyone reaching for tools to combat the Kansas-Nebraska Act: Abraham Lincoln. Pro-slavery Democrats called the Republicans radicals for their determination to stop the expansion of slavery, but Lincoln countered that the Republicans were the country’s true conservatives, for they were the ones standing firm on the Declaration of Independence. The enslavers rejecting the Founders’ principles were the radicals.  

The next year, Lincoln articulated an ideology for the party, defining it as the party of ordinary Americans defending the democratic idea that all men are created equal against those determined to overthrow democracy with their own oligarchy.

In 1860, at a time when voting was almost entirely limited to white men, voters put Abraham Lincoln into the White House. Furious, southern leaders took their states out of the Union and launched the Civil War.

By January 1863, Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation ending the American system of human enslavement in lands still controlled by the Confederacy. By November 1863 he had delivered the Gettysburg Address, firmly rooting the United States of America in the Declaration of Independence. 

In that speech, Lincoln charged Americans to rededicate themselves to the unfinished work for which so many had given their lives. He urged them to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

In less than ten years the country went from a government dominated by a few fabulously wealthy men who rejected the idea that human beings are created equal and who believed they had the right to rule over the masses, to a defense of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and to leaders who called for a new birth of freedom. But Lincoln did not do any of this alone: always, he depended on the votes of ordinary people determined to have a say in the government under which they lived.

In the 1860s the work of those people established freedom and democracy as the bedrock of the United States of America, but the structure itself remained unfinished. In the 1890s and then again in the 1930s, Americans had to fight to preserve democracy against those who would destroy it for their own greed and power. Each time, thanks to ordinary Americans, democracy won.

Now it is our turn. 

In our era the same struggle has resurfaced. A small group of leaders has rejected the idea that all people are created equal and seeks to destroy our democracy in order to install themselves into permanent power. 

And just as our forebears did, Americans have reached for whatever tools we have at hand to build new coalitions across the nation to push back. After decades in which ordinary people had come to believe they had little political power, they have mobilized to defend American democracy and—with an electorate that now includes women and Black Americans and Brown Americans—have discovered they are strong. 

On November 5 we will find out just how strong we are. We will each choose on which side of the historical ledger to record our names. On the one hand, we can stand with those throughout our history who maintained that some people were better than others and had the right to rule; on the other, we can list our names on the side of those from our past who defended democracy and, by doing so, guarantee that American democracy reaches into the future. 

I have had hope in these dark days because I look around at the extraordinary movement that has built in this country over the past several years, and it looks to me like the revolution of the 1850s that gave America a new birth of freedom. 

As always, the outcome is in our hands. 

“Fellow-citizens,” Lincoln reminded his colleagues, “we cannot escape history. We…will be remembered in spite of ourselves.”  

–-

Notes:

James Henry Hammond, Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond, of South Carolina (New York: John F. Trow and Company, 1866), 126.

https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm

New York Tribune, March 7, 1857, p. 4.

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