Britney Spears may be free of the restrictive conservatorship that ruled her life for 13 years, but the Toxic singer’s ongoing battle with her father is about to go to a whole other level.
At a hearing in Los Angeles Superior Court today, Judge Brenda Penny agreed with attorneys on both sides that an evidentiary hearing is needed to decide if Jamie Spears spied on his daughter in her bedroom and elsewhere, and if he plundered the one-time Princess of Pop’s multimillion-dollar fortune.
The mini-trial of sorts looks set to start on July 27.
Coming a little over two months after Judge Penny pulled the plug on the contentious conservatorship, Wednesday’s long scheduled and briefly blackout plagued hearing in DTLA directly follows filings that reiterate a seemingly consistent campaign of lining his own pockets and surveillance by the elder Spears.
“During his tenure as Conservator, Mr. Spears used his role as Conservator to enrich himself and those loyal or useful to him, often at the expense and against the best interests of his own daughter, whose assets, welfare, and best interests he was supposed to protect,” says a former FBI agent hired by Britney Spears’ lawyer Matthew Rosengart to probe Jamie Spears’ years and years control of his offspring’s career and more than $60 million estate (READ THE DECLARATION HERE)
“Beyond the financial misconduct, Mr. Spears had actual and apparent conflicts of interest in violation of industry norms and the Rules governing the conduct of a conservator and also engaged in and directed others to engage in unconscionable Violations of Ms. Spears’s privacy and civil liberties, which also implicates federal or state criminal violations of the law,” now Kroll Associates Inc associate managing director Sherine Ebadi in a declaration submitted to the docket on January 14.
As well as pitching himself for a cooking show and snagging $6.3 million from his daughter’s Estate and accounts, the elder Spears also conducted “self-dealing,” according to Ebadi. Having already authorized the expenditure of more than $30 million in fees to be paid by the Estate to dozens of firms between 2008 and 2020,” Jamie Spears still wants Britney Spears to pay his current legal fees – which are a result of her fight to disentangle herself from him.
Right now that matter and the efforts of others to get money out of the Spears Estate will be pushed to that evidentiary hearing this summer. Expected to last several days, the mini-trial will also address allegations that Jamie Spears used the security firm Black Box to illegally spy on Britney Spears.
Today saw the elder Spears’ newish attorney Alex Weingarten proclaiming “didn’t happen” of the claims of the extensive monitoring of the younger Spears in her home, on her various phones and other devices and elsewhere. First reported by the New York Times in print and in the FX on Hulu’s Controlling Britney Spears last September, the claims have long been denied by the elder Spears even when a former Black Box employee came forth as a whistleblower.
Now those denials have failed to pass at least one test, with perhaps more to come in court.
“Following publication of these troubling allegations, I personally debriefed and
interviewed the whistleblower, Alex Vlasov, at the Bel Air Hotel in Los Angeles at the direction of counsel for Ms. Spears and I corroborated the Times’s reporting on Mr. Spears’s extensive, surveillance efforts, including of Ms. Spears’s attorney-client communications and private conversations in her bedroom, “ex-G-woman Ebadi said in her 27-page declaration of late last week “Based upon my training and experience, including as a Special Agent with the FBI, and having debriefed and interviewed many hundreds of individuals and witnesses, I concluded that Mr. Vlasov was highly-credible,” she damningly concluded.
As for Britney herself — the singer was silent, but poignant in a social media post this afternoon.
Of course, that comes after very publicly battling the past week with her sister Jamie Lynn over the latter’s supposedly revelation filled memoir and having Greenberg Traurig LLP’s Rosengart send a cease and desist letter — so what more is there to say?
