It’s Britney, bitch. Last summer, on a road trip back from the Salton Sea, I found myself with ten hours to kill, a sufficiently gay co-pilot, and a burning question: what the hell is going on with Britney Spears? My friend and I turned to Britney’s Gram for answers, a comedy podcast that had improbably become the go-to source of news on Spears’ evolving legal battle against her conservatorship, and what would months later provide the single, crucial piece of unsubstantiated ‘inside information’ central to the New York Times’ documentary Framing Britney Spears, which positioned the pop superstar as a prisoner and catapulted a niche fandom’s #FreeBritney movement into the stuff of global zeitgeist. The conventional opinion, shared across the ideological spectrum from Fox News to the Times, is Britney Spears needs help. Here, I agree. I’m just not entirely convinced her family is the problem. And as someone living in San Francisco, a city where conservatorship has all but been eradicated, a city that has been brought to its knees by a crisis of mental illness, a city that has turned its most vulnerable citizens to the streets, out of sight out of mind and covered literally in their own feces — for the sake of compassion — I’ve been wondering: is doing nothing really “help”?

“Should we start from the beginning?” my friend asked.

“My body is ready,” I said.

We entered the Britneyverse.

The high-level problem of Spears’ saga is verifiable details about her life are scarce, and no one, from click-crazed journalists to delirious Britney stans, is unwilling to offer their twisted fantasies as evidence of some insidious crime. Social media is, it is always worth noting, exceedingly loud and relentlessly stupid. But what we know for sure is this: thirteen years ago, after what appeared to be a very public mental breakdown, Britney entered conservatorship, a legal arrangement that placed her father Jamie Spears in control of her personal decisions and her attorney Andrew Wallet in control of her finances (Wallet has since resigned from the conservatorship, leaving Jamie in complete control). Also around this time, through a separate set of legal rulings shrouded in even greater mystery than the conservatorship, Britney lost custody of her children. The basis for both court decisions appears to be Britney’s mental health.

The conservatorship persisted until 2019, when Britney’s father petitioned the court to extend the arrangement, and Britney began to push legally for release. Her resistance became more public in 2020, which is when I learned about it all from the ladies over at Britney’s Gram, and the story boiled over into international scandal last week when Britney finally spoke in court. You can read her full statement here. It’s chilling.

Spears likens her conservatorship to sex trafficking, and to slavery, and in her statement she asked to be released — notably, and repeatedly stated, without another mental evaluation. “Britney Spears’ courtroom speech was a woman’s plea for human rights” exclaimed the Los Angeles Times. Every celebrity on the planet echoed the sentiment, and support for Spears poured in from across the American political spectrum. In one surreal moment, Tucker Carlson interviewed Rose McGowan, and both were in agreement: it was time to #FreeBritney. Glen Greenwald endorsed the segment on Twitter, and so there we all were, a great stew of bluechecks and no checks and centrists and communists united, finally, under a single banner.

Leave. Britney. Alone.

I probably shouldn’t touch this. I mean my God, I really should just not touch this.

Anyway, fuck it, a few quick questions.

What do any of these people, from the New York Times’ Spears “experts” in Framing Britney to Tucker and Halsey and Jameela Jamil know about conservatorship at all, let alone the particulars of Britney’s case? Is anyone even remotely curious about what it is, exactly, every one of the judges who presided over Britney’s cases, from her conservatorship to the custody of her children, saw in her sealed court documents that led to these rulings? And now that I think about it, how do we know so little about Britney’s mental health? It’s been thirteen years, and no meaningful leak? This kind of silence requires incredible commitment to keeping the information private not only from Britney’s doctors, but from all of her closest friends and family members, including her ex-husband, and her divorced mother and father who frankly seem to hate each other. It’s likely some of the people in Britney’s life have kept this information private due to non-disclosure agreements. But is everyone close to her under NDA? Or have most of the people in Britney’s life kept quiet about the particulars of her mental health in the admirable hope of preserving her dignity, privacy, and legacy, something none of her so-called fans — the opinion of whom is infuriatingly cited by the media as relevant — and certainly none of her new champions in the media, ever cared about while the woman was mentally dissolving in front of an audience of billions. Slowly. For years.

This brings us to what I believe to be the real reason for our present mania surrounding the conservatorship of Spears, and the legal institution of conservatorship more broadly, which has nothing to do with what’s best for Britney: guilt.

Britney’s stardom was born in the late 1990s, truly exploding in the early 2000s, which made her the queen of what was probably the oddest chapter of American pop history to date. In the first place, the word “pop” was at that time briefly a pejorative. America was just finally exiting the shadow of Kurt Cobain, a Real Artist, and “pop stars” were imposters, as hated by the cultural gatekeepers of the coastal urban left for their degradation of Real Music as they were by the Christian Right (and this sounds truly ridiculous in the age of Wet Ass Pussy) for their sexually provocative outfits and message. But throughout the early 2000s pop music was also more popular than it had ever been, more popular by some metrics than any genre of music in history, shattering record sales at the dawn of both — and this is really the thing — Napster and the social internet, which put a public spotlight on pop stars brighter than anything ever before seen. Britney was the totemic embodiment of the genre, and the moment, and because of this she was hunted down by the paparazzi, and brutalized by a nascent and uniquely toxic blogosphere.

To my mind, and to I think by now the minds of most Americans, there is no doubt this woman was treated by the public with a unique cruelty, which at the time made discussion of her clearly burgeoning mental illness impossible. If she was truly sick, nothing could have justified the public’s behavior, and everyone in the press was complicit. But the public’s behavior also isn’t ancient history. It’s important to remember that Britney’s Gram, the podcast that put #FreeBritney on the map, didn’t start as a public quest for justice. The show followed Britney’s bizarre Instagram presence, which was by 2018 something of a meme, and opened with a look at one of Britney’s most well-known posts, which I’m sure anyone sufficiently online remembers:

The hosts loved Britney, they said, and years later they would say this while discussing her conservatorship literally through jarring, performative sobs. But what exactly were they talking about those years before, examining each of Britney’s posts in joking detail? Spears wasn’t producing comedy, she was just talking, while the public — and certainly the hosts of this show — laughed. How many of Britney’s present crusaders for justice were once Perez Hilton fans, the man who more or less invented cyberbullying and brutalized Britney Spears for years? A man who is himself now one of Britney’s greatest “defenders”? 

But Perez apologized for his youthful media hate machine. Water under the bridge, and he’s a good guy now. Right?

We don’t know anything about Britney’s mental health, and I would never offer a firm opinion on something so sensitive while knowing so little. But neither should anyone else, and in the obvious quest to absolve ourselves from past horrors inflicted on this woman we’re once again shoving ourselves into her life. Worse, by generalizing some warped version of her story and indicting the “system” that allowed it, we’re ignoring the realities of hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people across the country by extension, and I’m not talking about anxiety, or seasonal depression, or ADHD. I’m talking about the kind of psychosis that destroys people.

Flowers in your hair. According to Matthew State, UCSF chair of psychiatry, the homeless population of San Francisco numbers around 10,000 people, 30 to 40 percent of whom suffer from some form of serious mental illness. Conservatively speaking, that means we’re looking at something like 3,000 people roaming the streets of our city incapacitated by ailments we don’t even fully understand. For many people, homelessness is not a problem, it’s a symptom. The question decent people have struggled with for decades is how to help the mentally ill while navigating what is in any free society the profoundly important question of an individual’s right to autonomy. But anyone who lives in San Francisco can see what we’re doing — or really not doing, let’s be real — is wrong. On some deep, instinctive level we know there’s something wrong about letting a person deteriorate on our own sidewalks. It’s wrong to look away.

Forcing the incapacitated, and at the very least the dangerously incapacitated, into professional care is something many in the city have fought for, and a few years back San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed led the charge. I interviewed Trisha Thadani, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and she gave a great account of that battle in an episode of Anatomy of Next.

You can check out the full interview on Apple Podcasts here, or SoundCloud here (the conversation on conservatorship begins at 35:30). After a massive, years-long battle the city moderates in favor of conservatorship came to a compromise with the far left opposed to conservatorship, resulting in a new set of rules surrounding the practice:

It would now be possible to compel a person out of control of their faculties into care provided that person was dual-diagnosed with a severe mental illness and drug addiction, brought into custody at least 8 times in a single year for posing serious harm to themselves or someone else, and was provided a place to live for literally the rest of their life. In other words, conservatorship would still be, effectively, impossible. According to Thadani, of the city’s entire population suffering from mental illness to the point of self-harm, the new conservatorship impacted possibly 5.

5 people.

5 people of literally thousands.

Today, with no shortage of social media influencers doing the ‘important work’ of destigmatizing their mental illness, many of us seem to have forgotten what the real stuff looks like. I’m talking about the kind of mental illness that cripples people, and their families, and entire communities. And does a city that no longer believes in crazy as a concept err, inevitably, toward a state of insanity? We shut the asylums down, and then we became them.

Britney Spears may very well have recovered, or not, which of course none of us could possibly know. That having been said, my sense is this is all a little more complicated than a cartoonishly-evil father enslaving a beloved pop star. Spears’ family is grappling with the same complicated question we are grappling with across the country, and there are no easy answers. But just because the world’s gone mad doesn’t mean that madness ceased to be a problem.

-SOLANA