Britney Spears Describes Harrowing MRIs as She Rips Into Conservatorship

Britney Spears lashed out at her father and the 13-year conservatorship that he helped oversee on her behalf in a series of outraged posts on Monday (Oct. 17). The tweets chronicled what she said was a harrowing medical experience she endured before being institutionalized.

“I believe in a world where we all deserve justice !!! 15 years in a system of secretive and manipulative abuse … JUST ENDING IT has never been good enough for me and it will never be !!! I was talked to abusively and punished for no reason at all,” Spears tweeted in the first of a half-dozen posts in which she lambasted the arrangement that handed control of her personal and professional life to her father, Jamie Spears, and a group of lawyers.

“I believe I have absolutely nothing to prove on the whereabouts of what was done to me … it is all known !!! With that being said, people who have mistreated me on that kind of scale just ending the system is not good enough,” she continued, adding a VoiceNote in which she told a previously unheard story about her treatment.

Describing it as “one of the weirdest things” she’s ever encountered, Spears said she had three MRIs before going to “that place”; Spears did not specify the date of the procedures or which facility she was referring to, though the singer was placed in mental health facilities in 2008 and 2019. The star said she wasn’t complaining about any health problems before the procedures and that she was told she “had to go,” even though she wasn’t sure why she was having them.

Spears noted that when she was eight years old, she had a cyst on her chest that was removed which required an MRI to determine that it wasn’t cancer. “So whenever I hear ‘MRI’ I kind of was like, ‘that’s a big deal, something must be wrong with me,'” she recalled thinking. But unlike when she was eight — when Britney said she stayed in the enveloping MRI machine for 30 minutes — she described the more recent MRIs during the conservatorship as lasting well over an hour.

“Which is a lot of being still,” she said of the diagnostic machine that can require a patient to lie perfectly still inside the large device for extended period of time as it clicks and whirrs while scanning the area of interest. “The whole thing didn’t make sense — the isolation, the nurses, [unintelligible] … to me I was like, ‘Wait, is this a new kind of cancer treatment? [Is] that why they sent me away to this place? They didn’t want me to know?'” she thought at the time. “None of that it true, I’m fine, I’m alive.”

Spears’ string of tweets continued, as she wrote that she endured the alleged mistreatment though “I did absolutely nothing wrong… I have no justice at all in my eyes… at all!!! The court system ended it TWO YEARS after I told them about 15 years of my abuse … my home friends jumping up and down when the judge ruled it to be over … a metaphor.” Spears was placed into the restrictive conservatorship in 2008 after the singer was twice put on 5150 psychiatric holds amid what was described at the time as a public mental health crisis.

At press time a spokesperson for Jamie Spears could not be reached for comment.

“Yet when I called them in that place they said it’s not illegal but it may seem illegal with what they are doing … because what your in is DIFFERENT … different my a– !!!.” she tweeted. “It’s been many months since it has been over … my wish is to take my father to a place … take his car away … his home away … his door to privacy away … sit him down 7 days a week from 8 am to 6 pm being asked questions and people treating him like a science experience … monitoring his food … no phone … nurses watch him shower and dress.”

Seemingly describing the tight strictures she lived under during the conservatorship, Spears also said she wanted her father to go through “all the things with no f—ing reason at all and have him call his family and they say WE DON’T KNOW!!! I’d like to see the state of California sit back and have 4 security men at a trailer house for months telling him he can’t ever leave !!! I’d like to see how he would feel.”

That however, she wrote, will “never happen.” Reflecting on a judge’s decision to end the conservatorship in November 2021, Spears said, “The only good thing that happened for me was that it ended !!! I don’t see how they get to walk away so easily and get away with what was done to me … the world has shown me and the world only that cruelty wins !!!”