Originally published at: The new Britney Spears documentary offers a surprising angle for exploring disability rights | Boing Boing
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TAKEDOWN’d. :-/
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Brian Wilson comes to mind.
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My thought exactly! Love and Mercy forced me to take a whole new look at his music, and now a song like, In my room has a whole new meaning for me. I wouldn’t have thought there was anything that could make me take another look at this woman’s music, but I’d love to be wrong about that.
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the OP makes a point to explain that the author doesn’t follow Spears, and then assumes that everyone reading knows that A) Spears has a mental handicap and B) what that handicap is.
so, what does the court define her condition as? addiction?
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I believe that is considered private medical information. I assume that those records are sealed, and if not I hope BB would not publish that information anyway unless they were certain that Ms Spears had publicly revealed that of her own free will.
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More to the point, the New York Times has decided that “Brittany Spears has a cognitive disability!” is the headline for a different story than the one they have decided to tell.
Her true fans and detractors will probably have to wait for a Rupert Murdoch publication to dig up the dirt on that other story. I think the Times made the right call on this issue.
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ok, that’s good; but without addressing that it’s privileged information, the assumption is that it’s common knowledge. it’s poor writing was the point I was trying to make. I’m glad the courts won’t disclose it, but OP read like it already had been.
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To be fair: I don’t even know if Spears has a specifically diagnosable cognitive disorder. She did, however, have a pretty public mental breakdown in the late 2000s. While this was presumably sparked at least in part by the stress of being constantly hounded by paparazzi and allegedly emotionally abused by numerous men, there may be something else going on as well. Either way: that mental breakdown alone was enough for her father to convince a court that was “mentally unwell” and thus incapable of making her own decisions.
This kind of conservatorship is sadly more common with the elderly and people with physical disabilities. Perhaps Spears does have bipolar, or BPD, or something else; I think the point is more that her father used the public breakdown to legally control her, for profit.
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I think that’s immaterial. The court has decided she has a disability, regardless of what that might be, or if it exists at all. The OP’s point as I read it is that people with (or without) disabilities can lose their agency by order of a court.
I watched the doc with the same initial skepticism - what are these super fans doing? Why care about a super-rich pop star’s situation?
I quickly saw that something supremely hinky seems to be happening here. If it can happen to someone with the fame and visibility of Britney, what else might be happening to less powerful folk?
The moment when the judge told her attorney that she isn’t capable of hiring an attorney because of reasons was particularly worrisome.
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She did have a very public break down a while back (including public break down, presumed unfitness for raising a kid, a messy divorce, nearly going to rehab, but never committing, etc) and has been in conservatorship under her father ever since. She lost custody of her kid/kids for a while, i think to her ex-husband.
It was pretty high profile, but if you’re not into pop music or celebrity gossip, then you probably missed it? I know about some of this thanks to Jezebel covering it from a feminist perspective.
But I was not aware of her having cognitive disorder, too, I just knew that she had had some problems
back in the 2000s…
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ok, I get it now.
maybe I’m just thick, but I could have used a “her father used her public breakdown – which is unclear whether was brought on by external stress and manipulation rather than an actual internal cognitive disorder – as a means for a power grab” in there somewhere to get what you got intuitively.
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Also this. It is important to keep in mind that while legal definitions are often informed by medical diagnoses they are not the same thing and there is no real reason that they should be since they serve different purposes. The court made the decision that legally she was unable to care for her basic needs and appointed someone to be responsible for that. That decision may have been in part based on a specific medical diagnosis but that is neither necessary nor sufficient.
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Well, it helped that I had already seen the doc. I might not have gotten it so easily otherwise. It’s definitely worth watching, and at 1 hour and 15 minutes it manages to present its case more quickly than many such.
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I remember her rather public breakdown as well, but that was nearly 20 years ago. If she was getting treatment it’s hard to believe she has made no progress. I am a little dubious about the “cognitive disabilities” claim because she managed to become a pop star and was with it enough to do public performances and make music videos etc… You can handhold people to a degree, but she would have had to have had superhuman handlers to keep up with all of that. There are a lot of yellow flags around that court case and the subsequent behavior.
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Entirely could be the case of course. I couldn’t say either way, but we know there is a long history of mental illness being used as an excuse to disenfranchise women, so… there’s that too.
But I was just explaining what’s going on with Spears to @noahdjango with regards to the public record, certainly not saying it was true as it was told in the tabloids.
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If only a court can rescind a conservatorship and her father is controlling how she spends her money does that have any bearing on who she can appoint as a lawyer (or indeed whether he even permits her spending on it) to fight said conservatorship in court.
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It has been frustrating (to say the least) that the Free Britney movement has been regarded as a joke - when you find out what’s actually been happening, it’s sickening. Since 2008 she’s been unable to make any decisions for herself, yet has somehow been well enough to be making giant piles of money for her father to decide what to spend on.
Like many here, I’m not really a fan of her music, but as a human being I’ve been horrified.
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Yes, I believe it does, along with whether she is even allowed to appear in court. I’m sure there is a requirement that the guardian act in the best interests of the person so outright preventing her from contacting a lawyer or challenging the conservatorship could potentially land him in legal trouble. But if you don’t have access to courts it can be hard to get to that point and if you don’t have access to independent legal council it can be hard to even know what your rights are. There are lots of “soft power” ways to control someone’s actions when you have authority over them that aren’t so blatant. It’s also entirely possible that he has never used his conservatorship power to do anything untoward and that he acted entirely in what he perceived as her best interests. But even genuinely benevolent conservatorship is still reducing someone’s freedom and needs to be scrutinized carefully and I find it hard to believe that based on Ms. Spears’ actions and demonstrated abilities that she has remained unable to care for herself to an extent that would warrant a conservatorship for 12 years.
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Thank you for shedding a light on this.
I didn’t realize how many slimebags were actually responsible for her demise.
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