A judge officially suspended Britney Spears’s father as her conservator on Wednesday, but the pop star’s fight to regain control of her life and hold her father accountable isn’t over yet.
A hearing regarding the complete termination of her conservatorship has been set for November 12, when Judge Brenda Penny will decide whether to end the 13-year-old legal arrangement per the singer’s request. The hearing comes just weeks before the star’s 40th birthday.
In the meantime, her lawyer Mathew Rosengart, whom she hired in July, will likely be able to explore potential actions against Britney’s father, James “Jamie” Spears. Because Rosengart successfully petitioned Penny to replace him as the conservator of her estimated £44 million fortune but keep the conservatorship in place for now, all documents on the 13-year-old legal arrangement must now be handed over to Jamie Spears’s replacement.
Penny agreed to appoint John Zabel, a certified public accountant selected by Britney Spears and her lawyer, for the role.
“It’s a great day for justice. She’s very happy,” Rosengart said of Britney Spears’s reaction Wednesday as he exited the courthouse.
Those documents could be instrumental in Rosengart’s effort to investigate Jamie Spears’s treatment of his client, which he alleged in court Wednesday to be “cruel” and “toxic.” In one example, Rosengart said that her father “instructed a security team, paid for by my client, to place a listening device in Britney’s bedroom.”
In response, Jamie Spears’s attorney Vivian Thoreen said: “It’s not evidence; it’s rhetoric.”
In court on Wednesday, Thoreen had argued for a different outcome: the complete and immediate termination of the conservatorship, which would have kept the documents private. Jamie Spears began advocating for its termination in recent weeks despite his previous insistence that the conservatorship was necessary to care for his “mentally sick” daughter.
Penny also denied Jamie Spears’s request to appeal the suspension.
Though his strategy required him to push back on the conservatorship’s immediate end on Wednesday, Rosengart is still pursuing that outcome for Britney Spears and plans to address it in court by November 12.
The pop music icon has made it clear she wants father to face consequences for his actions as her conservator. During her bombshell testimony about the conservatorship over the summer, she pleaded with Penny: “Ma’am, my dad and anyone involved in this conservatorship and my management who played a huge role in punishing me when I said no – ma’am, they should be in jail.”
Spears’s allegations against her father and others involved in the conservatorship include them forcing her to use an IUD to prevent her from becoming pregnant despite her wishes to have another child, and directing her doctor to put her on lithium, a strong mood-stabilising drug, when they deemed her uncooperative at rehearsals for a series of Las Vegas shows she didn’t want to perform in.