Britney Spears Describes What It Was Like Living Under Conservatorship: I Became a 'Child-Robot' (Exclusive)
"I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself," the pop icon writes of her conservatorship in her new memoir, 'The Woman in Me'
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Britney Spears performs at the Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas in May 2016Britney Spears is breaking her silence on how her conservatorship experience affected her.
In this week’s issue, PEOPLE has an exclusive excerpt from the pop icon’s new memoir, The Woman in Me. In the book, Spears discusses life under the court-ordered conservatorship, which in 2008 granted her father Jamie and a lawyer control over Spears’ financial and personal affairs.
“I became a robot. But not just a robot — a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself,” Spears, 41, writes in the book. “The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
Under the conservatorship, Spears felt “like a shadow of myself,” she writes.
“This is what’s hard to explain, how quickly I could vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom. There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl; but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult,” Spears writes.
In the book, she adds: “The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time. I felt like I was being deprived of those good secrets of life — those fundamental supposed sins of indulgence and adventure that make us human. They wanted to take away that specialness and keep everything as rote as possible. It was death to my creativity as an artist.”
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Britney Spears on the cover of PEOPLEIn June 2021, after more than 13 years under the conservatorship, Spears offered fervent testimony in open court, accusing her father and others of exploitation and abuse and pleading with the judge to end the conservatorship. By September, her dad was suspended as conservator, and in November, the conservatorship was terminated.
Since the end of the conservatorship, Spears has been reclaiming her voice and piecing her life back together. In a new interview with PEOPLE conducted over email, Spears discusses her new freedom.
“Over the past 15 years or even at the start of my career, I sat back while people spoke about me and told my story for me. After getting out of my conservatorship, I was finally free to tell my story without consequences from the people in charge of my life,” Spears says. “It is finally time for me to raise my voice and speak out. And my fans deserve to hear it directly from me. No more conspiracy, no more lies — just me owning my past, present and future.”
The Woman in Me is available for pre-order ahead of its Oct. 24 release.
For more of the exclusive excerpt and interview with Britney Spears, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere Friday.
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