The Systematic Abuse of Britney Spears:
How the Legal System Allowed a Criminal Family to Seize Control of One Woman’s Life
The New Yorker recently published a comprehensive article entitled “Britney Spears’s Conservatorship Nightmare” chronicling how the pop star’s father and a team of lawyers seized control of her life, her career, and her finances—and held onto that control for well over a decade. Spears, thirty-nine, has spent the past thirteen years living under a conservatorship, “a legal structure,” The New Yorker defines “in which a person’s personal, economic, and legal decision-making power is ceded to others.” Commonly called a guardianship, the arrangement is intended for people who cannot take care of themselves.
The conservatorship was instituted by Spears’s family—in part out of real concerns for her mental health, people close to the family told The New Yorker. But the family was divided by money and fame, and Spears was ultimately stripped of her rights to such an extent that she recently called 911 to report herself as a victim of conservatorship abuse and alleged in public court that one of her most basic rights—her reproductive freedom—had been taken away. (You can find a link to The New Yorker article at the bottom of this blog.)*
Conservatorships can protect people who are elderly, or who live with severe disabilities or debilitating mental illness. But The New Yorker points out that there is also a wide range of alternatives to conservatorship that are less strict than what Spears has experienced, such as conditional powers of attorney or formal shared control of finances.
By outward appearance, since the establishment of Spears’s conservatorship, the pop star’s career has never been better. According to the article, she has released four albums, headlined a global tour that grossed a hundred and thirty-one million dollars, and performed for four years in a hit Las Vegas residency. Yet during this time her conservators have controlled all her spending, communications, and personal decisions, and most of her family members (including both her parents) receive an annual salary from the pop star as part of the conservatorship.
This past April, Spears requested a hearing, in open court, to discuss the terms of her conservatorship arrangement. Before the hearing, members of Spears’s team, most of whom have had little or no direct contact with her for years (despite being on her payroll), didn’t expect drastic changes to result. On June 23rd that sentiment quickly changed as she began her searing testimony.
For twenty-three minutes over the phone, Spears described in shocking detail how she had been “isolated, medicated, financially exploited, and emotionally abused.” She blamed the California legal system, which she said let it all happen. She added that she had tried to complain to the court before but had been ignored, which made her “feel like I was dead,” she said—“like I didn’t matter.” She wanted to share her story publicly, she said, “instead of it being a hush-hush secret to benefit all of them.” She added, “It concerns me I’ve been told I’m not allowed to expose the people who did this to me.” At one point, she told the court, “All I want is to own my money, for this to end, and for my boyfriend to drive me in his fucking car.” Read more
“The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.” Mahatma Gandhi made that statement in the early 1900s, right at the start of the 20th Century. Who are those most vulnerable members? Certainly, they include children, the mentally and physically disabled, and our aged population. Today, 21 years into the 21st Century, Gandhi’s words come back to haunt us as we enter World Elder Abuse Month this June. A decade ago, The United Nations designated June 15th as World Elder Abuse Awareness Day to raise mindfulness and knowledge of elder abuse and the various forms it can manifest which include financial, emotional, and physical abuse.
When activist Tarana Burke started the “Me Too” movement in 2006, her goal was to raise awareness of the full extent of sexual abuse, assault, and harassment in society. She wanted to tell survivors, “You are heard. You are understood. You are not alone.”
People may believe, since I am writing a book about my grandma’s ordeal and her experience with elder abuse, that I jumped at the opportunity to support her during the actual trial. The truth is this: I wavered for weeks about getting involved in the process. Ultimately, reality and morality won over my personal reticence, and I agreed to take the stand on my grandma’s behalf and testified against the perpetrators, my two first cousins Evan and Avi. They had done our grandmother a terrible wrong. They had to be brought to justice, they had to make restitution, and they had to stop their intolerable harassment.
Five years ago, my grandmother whom I call Nanny, Beverley Schottenstein, had no idea that anything nefarious was going on within her account. Though she did ask her grandsons Evan and Avi why she wasn’t receiving monthly statements, they assured her that J.P. Morgan no longer sent paper statements to their clients, and since Nanny didn’t have a computer, they said they were diligently reviewing her holdings and overall account performance on their own. They swore they were doing an incredible job, that her account was appreciating considerably, and that she was outperforming major market indexes on a regular basis. Actually, none of that was true. Both grandsons were living high on the hog with her money—she just didn’t know it yet.
Over the last few months, the media has been covering my grandmother’s court case against her two grandsons, Evan and Avi Schottenstein, for massive financial fraud. After over two years since the initial discovery, they, along with J.P. Morgan, were found liable for misappropriating tens of millions of dollars of her money. Together, they were ordered to restore over $19 million to my grandmother. But something else happened in that courtroom that is far more important than any amount of money. The three presiding arbitrators described her experience as a clear case of “elder abuse.”