Watched 'Framing Britney Spears' and listened to her court testimony last night. Some thoughts on #FreeBritney:
The chances of further evidence coming out showing that the situation has been OK seem very slim.
The arrangement is basically involuntary servitude, where someone has to make money for their masters in order to be allowed to go about the rest of their life. How a conservatorship can be used to make someone work and earn money for others is beyond me.
A win for priors. People were missing lots of specific information, but the basic sketch of the situation — a young seemingly-capable person in a 13 years conservatorship, where everyone involved in the conservatorship is making tonnes of money out of it — spoke for itself, and placed the burden of proof on anyone claiming the arrangement was necessary.
Kudos to the FreeBritney folks. There was a case of involuntary servitude playing out in public and most people didn't notice or care, but they weren't deterred and acted on their own judgement.
The idea that something is a 'conspiracy theory' can be used to make a claim sound improbable. But some sorts of conspiracies are common-place, so one shouldn't judge something unlikely merely because one aspect of it is that it involves people privately coordinating to serve their own interests.
We surely do need a legal mechanism by which people at the end of their life can appoint someone else manage their affairs before e.g. their dementia renders them unable to do so. But it would be surprising if the same mechanism were appropriate for a young person suffering a manic or psychotic episode.
The same financial exploitation occurs to great numbers of old people in the United States and it's a disgrace: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/how-the-elderly-lose-their-rights... Hopefully this scandal can prompt reform to put an end to that.
We always need to be attentive to how the burden of proof can be arbitrarily shifted by the status quo. I would think a conservatorship of someone like Britney is such a severe rights violation it would require constant intense re-justification before a court, or would otherwise expire. One can fall into the trap of applying the standard "will Britney be personally better off in the conservatorship in my view" — but thank God that's not the legal standard we have for placing functioning adults under the power of others.
The conservatorship law creates a positive feedback loop that can hold people in it permanently. If the judge initially decides against you, you lose your ability to have your own legal council represent you at any point (?!), and the conservators can then exploit their court-appointed power to make it very hard for you to muster the resources or credibility to end it. This is a huge bug in the system.
The level of misogyny and general cruelty in mainstream US media is remarkable, and it seems it was substantially worse two decades ago than today. I hold special contempt for networks like e.g. NBC, which wanted to make money out of the Britney's fame while pretending to be respectable and keep their hands clean.
From one point of view Britney Spear's wellbeing in itself can't warrant the advocacy of hundreds of millions of people, because she's just one person. But the fact that the US legal system can be manipulated to force someone into involuntary servitude and steal their money is atrocious and should be fixed urgently.