The Spears family fortune, such as may be, depends absolutely on Britney Spear’s career. So the thinking there is that having Jamie in charge of her conservatorship creates an appearance of risk of caring more about what’s good for the fortune, than about what’s good for the individual human being.
Remember that when dealing with conflict of interest arguments it is common to refer to “conflict or the appearance of conflict” – for many people there seems to be such an appearance.
Me, I do hope for a solution that is the best for this woman in every sense but there needs to be trust that it is so.
The discussion in this thread that I was responding to wasn’t about money being “siphoned off” but about ongoing salaries/fees.
FWIW it doesn’t seem that there’s been any siphoning off and her fortune has apparently grown substantially under the conservatorship. I don’t see how the “Spears family fortune” benefits from her having more money, to the extent that this refers to anyone other than her children.
I believe she has claimed that she was compelled to perform against her will. But ISTM that these are instances where she was willing to commit upfront and then wanted to back out of signed contracts afterwards. This is exactly the type of self-destructive behavior that a conservatorship is designed to prevent. That’s my impression anyway. Possibly incorrect, but possibly not.
But again, my sympathies lean strongly to ending the conservatorship and letting her do what she wants and reap the rewards and suffer the consequences, as the case may be.
It’s very possible that Britney has been told and believes her father has unlimited power over her. After all, he had for years. If she has been under complete control of someone else, that conditioning would be very hard for her to break.
And if she backs out of a contract and is sued…? That might be self destructive, but its also completely reasonable to say “I signed on for this tour/movie/Olympic spot when my health was in a different place. I now am not in a state of health to be able to meet my obligations.” That’s the opposite of self destructive.
But its also her prerogative to take self destructive actions. If she isn’t a threat to herself or others (and even if she is…it takes a lot to get an ordinary person committed long term). So she goes broke. She wouldn’t be the first celebrity to end up living in a trailer or working a dead end job. There are millions of people out there making self destructive decisions every day - some of them far more self destructive than Britney. Should they all be under court appointed conservatorship?
(Heck, I’ve done that … I signed a year long contract to project manage a project, and then had health problems and didn’t complete the contract. Was that self destructive? The opposite…although I haven’t worked a full time project management job since, my health is much better without it)
One thing I haven’t seen, although I haven’t been following this closely, is any action by Britney put forth by her conservators to show that she is still unable to meet the minimal requirements needed to place someone under a conservatorship.
And yeah, someone would need to get paid, but one of the issues with conservatorship is that there is a LOT of money at stake in this one in particular - and most of them. How much should you get paid to be Britney’s attorney when you are spending very little time on her issues and have never had a conversation longer than half an hour with her? How much should you get paid to be her conservator?
Its pretty easy when you have a large fortune to start with - and are still getting royalties as one of the most popular performers in the last fifty years - to grow that fortune. With the gains made by the S&P 500 over the term of Britney’s conservatorship, you would have to be an IDIOT not to have turned her fortune into a larger fortune. The rate of return for the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested for that period in time was 317%. Assuming she can live off dividends and royalties plus the money she made touring and releasing an album during her conservatorship and not have touched the principal, it would still be an over 200% return. (She is estimated to have made over $100M during her conservatorship mosting through three tours and her Vegas residency). She has - according to court documents - $60 million now. She owns her house outright, pays $20k a month in child support, and court documents have her on a $1500 a week budget - so its reasonable that she could live off the dividends and $100M she made. So the claim would have to be that she had $20 M in net worth remaining in 2008 for the conservatorship to be able to be able to claim its been at all financially successful.
It’s worse than just getting sued. Once you do that kind of thing, it gets much much harder to get future contracts, and your potential future earnings can dry up completely.
Right. I wrote the same thing in the post you’re responding to.
The financial issue is not that she’s not a shrewd investor or that her conservators are, but rather that she has not been responsible about dealing with money. For that matter, I don’t think the conservators are claiming to have turned $2.8M into $60M by shrewdly investing it, but rather that by imposing financial discipline they allowed her earnings to build up versus being frittered away.
I suspect that if/when she breaks free of the conservatorship she will revert to being irresponsible and will additionally be preyed on by smooth-talking hanger-onners who will make the current conservators (who are subject to court oversight) look like saints. But if that’s what she wants …
I don’t understand this line of reasoning- if she’s supposed to be incapable of managing her own affairs to the extent of needing a conservatorship, then surely she’s not signing contracts? And if someone else is doing so on her behalf, then why are they signing contracts it’s not clear she can reasonably fulfil, given her mental health is supposedly so poor?
I don’t see any logical reason why someone can be deemed not mentally healthy enough to refuse a stressful high pressure performance contract. Not mentally healthy enough to accept- that I can believe.
There seem to be a lot of assumptions in your post, which may not hold.
I don’t know if it’s at all established that her desire to back out of the contracts is because “her mental health is so poor”, at least in the sense that she’s mentally incapable of fulfilling them. As a point of fact, it appears that she was able to and did complete those contracts. (Or are you claiming that fulfilling them caused further long term damage to her mental health?)
It’s very possible - likely, even, based on her public actions both before and after the conservatorship - that Spears is capable of mood swings and of bizarre thoughts and actions when the spirit moves her. So if the spirit moves her to bail out of a contracted commitment, she might be inclined to actually do it regardless of the consequences, in the absence of someone pressuring her to do the responsible thing. And while she might say she’d rather not perform at all in such circumstances, it’s also very possible that she doesn’t appreciate the extent to which her lifestyle relies on her continued performance and that she’s far better off in the long term by doing something unpleasant for a while in furtherance of longer term goals. Much like ordinary people do every day.
A lot like any kid who commits to something and decides mid-way through that they’re not in the mood and want to bail out, and their parents pressure them to follow through. I wouldn’t consider that a “mental health” issue per se, and in the case of Spears the mental health aspect is primarily in that she may be somewhat childlike in this respect even as a grown woman.
Though again, I feel we outside observers don’t really know the situation well enough to know with any certainty what’s really true about this situation. I’m just reacting to people dialing up the outrage based on assumptions about the situation, and I’m pointing out that other interpretations of the observable facts are also plausible.
While we’re on the subject of controversial celebrity conservatorships, has anyone been following, or even noticed, the three-way contentious conservator battle over Nichelle Nichols?
I hadn’t heard of it, but I just noticed this:
TL;DR: Nichols, 88, has dementia and financial difficulties. Her son, her former manager, and a friend are battling each other over who gets to be her conservator, each claiming the others are not acting in her best interests.
Should anyone be interested in discussing this, I just noticed that @madsircool has started a new thread about it over in Cafe Society; he cites the same L.A.Times article that I did just above.
I’m not surprised or impressed. It’s my understanding that the conservator fees were overseen by the court, and this is from a legal filing in an argument that his ongoing legal fees should not be covered.
At this time, BS is also engaged in an increasingly bitter personal and legal fight with her younger sister JLS, over her (Britney’s) apparent demand that she be allowed to tell her version of events and no one else tell theirs.
In general, it looks to me like she is not getting any happier. Though again, I think she should be allowed the freedom and control to destroy herself (as she most likely will).
Six million sounds like a lot at first blush but when you consider her earnings over that time and how much talent management fees generally are, it’s reasonable. There might be other shady transactions (the article you linked mentions a deal to sell Britney’s property to him at a questionably low valuation) but he doesn’t really seem to have raided the kitty in an egregious way.
From what I can tell, Jamie Spears wanted to exercise personal control over Britney Spears and was allowed to do so by the courts without good reason for a long time. He got some money for exercising that control, which Britney would not have chosen to pay him, but the compensation seems to be mostly reasonable. Had he charged Britney $32 and a ham sandwich for the same work, she would still be understandably angry because her anger is due to the prolonged loss of her autonomy. Money is simply the thing she can sue for; she can’t get her years back.
The other big issue is that Jamie Spears seems to have spent millions from her estate on professional advisors. Some of that was because he needed help to manage her professional career, which might be reasonable spending, and some of that was because he wanted to preserve his control against Ms. Spears’s wishes and best interest. Ms. Spears should be angry about that waste. Worse yet, if those advisors were kicking back funds or free services to Jamie Spears. (I have seen no indication this is true.)
It might be reasonable if these were bona fide expenses associated with administering the conservatorship. But I don’t think that’s what they are alleging.
“After extracting those funds, he used them for his own purposes and aggrandizement, including among other things, to try to recreate his career as a cook by pitching a television show called ‘Cookin’ Cruzin’ & Chaos with James Spears,'” they say.
Britney Spears’ legal team said that in addition to taking more than $6 million during his 13 years as his daughter’s conservator, Jamie Spears also “petitioned for fees to be paid to dozens of different law firms” for “more than $30 million.”
