“How Britney Spears was trapped in a web of injustice”

That from the FT is the kind of headline we should be seeing.  From Henry Mance:

…for 13 years, courts in California have rewarded Spears’s father Jamie, a failed businessman who struggled with alcoholism, once filed for bankruptcy and who, according to the documentary Framing Britney Spears, was often absent from his daughter’s childhood. They have enabled arguably the most egregious villain of them all. In 2008, when his daughter suffered an apparent mental health crisis, Jamie asked a court to make him her conservator — that is, legal guardian. He has mostly kept the power since. He has decided which friends she sees, what medical treatment she receives and what happens to her fortune, estimated at $60m.

…They had made her work seven days a week, taken her credit cards and given her no privacy when undressing. “In California the only similar thing to this is called sex-trafficking,” she said. They would not let her have an intrauterine device removed, because they didn’t want her to have more kids. But they did allow a doctor to prescribe her lithium “out of nowhere”.

I get that you might have doubts about this case, or be able to cite many other cases where some form of guardianship might be useful.  But if something like this is possible at all, it is time to realize the whole system is broken and we need to work much harder to root out its abuses.

Time to wake up!  Be woke!  Really woke.

#FreeBritney