Britney Spears Is Still Trapped by the Stigma of Her Breakdown

It's been ten years since Britney Spears shaved the hair off her head, leaving her scalp and her soul bare to the world. Ten years since she made her exterior match what she was feeling inside. Ten years since she attacked a paparazzo's car with a broken teal umbrella in a fit of rage, when we can only assume she was trying to reclaim her privacy and, in turn, herself. 

To mark the tenth anniversary of Spears's momentous breakdown, on February 18, Lifetime released the unauthorized biopic, Britney Ever After. Eight seconds into the trailer, actor Natasha Barrett (who plays Britney) has already gotten out the shears. The Britney shears. And so, right at a moment when Spears seems to be relatively stable, her breakdown is dredged up all over again.

That year—2007—was a dark time for Britney: She had lost custody of her two sons and was put under a conservatorship, which signed her life and fortune over to her father and her lawyer. The legal framework for conservatorships is usually reserved for extremely ill people, and it basically stripped Spears of the right to make any decision in her own life or access her immense fortune.

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