Despite Britney Spears being freed from her conservatorship two years ago, the battle between the singer and her father is far from over. Britney’s legal team is trudging back to court on October 31 to oppose 71-year-old Jamie Spears’s request for his daughter to pay his legal fees and hand over documents.
Britney’s attorney, former federal prosecutor Mathew Rosengart, who skillfully freed her from the 13-year “toxic” conservatorship, filed a 130-page document on October 26 in advance of the hearing, imploring Judge Ana M. Luna not to give Jamie even $1 more of Britney’s money. Rosengart claims in the document that Jamie has been engaged in a campaign of “big lies” and that since his suspension as conservator, when he professed his “love” and “desire to protect his daughter” and said he would “unconditionally cooperate” and act with “complete transparency,” he has in fact done the exact opposite.
Jamie’s attorney, Alex Weingarten, countered Rosengart’s claims, telling Vulture that all he has succeeded in doing as Britney’s attorney is wasting her money with “zero to show for it.” Whatever Judge Luna decides, it is clear that Britney’s dispute with her father isn’t ending any time soon. Here’s what they’re arguing over.
Britney and her team are fighting back after she was “stripped of fundamental liberties for 13 years.”
Rosengart is asking the court to step in to stop “Mr. Spears’s abuse of the system, waste, and vindictive attempts to harass his daughter, contrary to law — and contrary to fundamental decency.” He maintains that Jamie has used the courts to extract evidence for the sole purpose of embarrassing or humiliating Britney and that he even attempted unsuccessfully to order the deposition of his 41-year-old daughter. Rosengart also says he finds it appalling that Jamie is demanding Britney hand over money to pay for his legal fees to do this.
“Despite all of this, and despite the fact that based upon fundamental legal principles and overwhelming evidence demonstrating that he is not entitled to and never will receive another dollar of his daughter’s money, he continues to harass her, using the court system to do so,” the recent court papers read.
Instead of Jamie stepping aside quietly after he was suspended as conservator, Rosengart accuses him and Weingarten of launching a “mean-spirited, scorched-earth litigation campaign” against Britney. He says Jamie tried to force his daughter to sit for a “revenge” deposition and tried unsuccessfully to unseal her private medical records.
“None of Mr. Spears’s filings or conduct has been to serve the interest of his daughter,” Rosengart writes in the recent court filings. During the conservatorship, he says, Britney was often forced to work against her will and treated like a “racehorse.”
“Mr. Spears is aware of his daughter’s claims of abuse,” Rosengart asserts in his recent motion. “He is aware of her belief — and the supporting evidence — that the conservatorship was unduly restrictive, bullying, and controlling. He is aware that she has been traumatized by the conservatorship. He is aware that she found it to be ‘soul crushing’ and infantilizing, while depriving her of her dignity. He knows that he was directly involved in monitoring his adult daughter’s text messages in real time and contemporaneously for years during the conservatorship — including private communication with her children and sacrosanct attorney-client privileged communications between her and her former attorney. And he knows (of course he knows) that he was directly involved in placing a secret listening device in the home of his adult daughter.”
Rosengart is asking the court to order Jamie to return all the money Britney has objected to being paid out during the last year of the conservatorship. Going forward, she wants nothing to do with her father after the trauma of being “stripped of fundamental liberties for 13 years.”
Jamie Spears wants a trial to clear his name.
Jamie’s attorney says his client has been repeatedly accused of wrongdoing such as orchestrating a surveillance campaign against his daughter. Rosengart attached former FBI Special Agent Sherine Ebadi’s 27-page highly-detailed forensic investigation to his latest filing that detailed the money paid to Jamie and Tri Star, the dehumanizing way Britney was treated, and the surveillance entity that monitored her actions during the conservatorship. Weingarten denied in court that it had happened and demanded that former Black Box security employee Alex Vlasov, the whistleblower who revealed the surveillance campaign to the New York Times, and Kroll Associate’s, Ebadi’s current employer, hand over documents about those claims. Rosengart maintains that Kroll has already volunteered thousands of pages of documents, even though they contain information Jamie already knows, and says in court papers that this is just another example of Jamie’s “endless stream of manufactured disputes.”
A trial date has been set for May.
“It is taking this long because Rosengart had fought having a trial set at all,” Weingarten tells Vulture. “When the court set a trial date, it was over Rosengart’s objections. He did not want a trial set at all, presumably because everything he is telling the press is a lie and he dreads the day of reckoning.”
Rosengart still wants answers from Tri Star, Britney’s former management company, but maintains in legal filings it has been stonewalled.
Rosengart alleges that Jamie, along with Tri Star’s counsel, continues to hide from depositions, including reneging twice at the 11th hour on agreed-upon dates.
Britney’s lawyer also accuses Jamie of playing an active part in Tri Star and its former employee Robin Greenhill not yet participating in depositions. Taylor’s attorney, John C. Hueston, says the depositions haven’t happened because Rosengart “has failed to notice these depositions in accordance with the rules of court.” Weingarten maintains that neither he nor Jamie has interfered with Tri Star’s depositions.
“Tri Star and Robin have not been deposed because Rosengart failed to actually notice the depositions,” Weingarten wrote to Vulture in an email. “Jamie had no role in causing Rosengart to not know how to do his job and had nothing to do with the scheduling of the depositions. Neither did I.”
Jamie, Weingarten says, complied with Rosengart’s request and sat for his deposition more than a year ago. Rosengart did not comment to Vulture other to note that Weingaraten’s claims were “false, desperate and pathetic.”
This story has been updated with additional information and is a developing story.
