“It was the revolution's season. Statues were being demolished, establishments were being renamed, and hundreds of people took to the streets every day, urging reform. A crowd of demonstrators had rallied outside the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles in late July, under an unusually gloomy sky. They adorned masks and carried handmade posters as they cheered, sung, and marched. They were young, multicultural, and meant business.

“What exactly do we want?”, a guy clad entirely in black and military boots called out via a hot-pink loudspeaker.

The outcry was uproarious : "Free Britney!"

The protesters had assembled just miles from City Hall, where two of the earliest Black Lives Matter demonstrations had taken place just weeks before. But this was a different trend, a small but growing one that claims Britney Spears is being kept in an unethical and potentially illegal conservatorship.”

Britney Jean Spears is an American singer, songwriter, dancer, and actress. She is credited with the revival of Teen Pop during the late 1990s and early 2000s, for which she is referred to as the "Princess of Pop."

Spears, who grew up in Kentwood, Louisiana, began singing and dancing at age two and was soon competing in talent shows. She later endured intense public scrutiny for her tumultuous personal life.

Britney has been under a conservatorship helmed by her father, Jamie Spears, since the singer's infamous breakdown 12 years ago. It all began in January 2008, when Britney was admitted to a hospital for a psychiatric assessment after refusing to return her children to the representatives of her ex-husband and their father, dancer Kevin Federline. This resulted in hospitalization and rehab. Following the incident, she lost custody of her two children. After a year of ‘irrational’ conduct, (including shaving her head and hitting a paparazzo's car with an umbrella), Britney was put in conservatorship following a public breakdown in 2008.

In the United States, a conservatorship is a variant of adult guardianship that requires the conservator — often another family member — to be in charge of the conservatee. A conservator is an individual or organisation who protects the conservatee and is granted a surprising amount of powers by the court to do so.

The case is contingent on the individual's capacity to make personal decisions. It is mostly for people who lack the functional capacity to look after themselves, their needs, finances, housing conditions, medical treatment, and general well-being, or who are vulnerable to fraud of any nature.

Since 2008, Britney Spears has had no power over the wealth that she has generated or general decisions regarding what she should or should not do. In 2019, she announced she wouldn’t perform until her father was removed as her conservator.

Some of Spears' supporters suspect she was coerced into the agreement and that she has been calling out for help on social media. The hashtag #FreeBritney was coined in 2009 by a fan site that disagreed with the conservatorship arrangement.

#FreeBritney is a campaign launched by Britney's fans to exert pressure on the authorities and terminate her conservatorship. It started when fans began to wonder if a high-functioning adult-like herself was truly unable to make her own judgments.

Britney's conservatorship has been veiled in non-disclosure contracts.

Britney's Gram, a fan podcast, broadcasted a voicemail from a person claiming to be a paralegal on Jamie Spears' legal staff, saying Britney was being kept in the institution against her will, and that her father had even canceled her Las Vegas residency because she declined to take her medication.

The voicemail went viral, spawning the FreeBritney hashtag, with support from the American Civil Liberties Union and celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Miley Cyrus, as well as marches outside the courts during the trials.

The court named Bessemer Trust as co-conservator of Britney's estate alongside Jamie in November 2020. The dispute is ongoing in court.

Britney is also obligated to reimburse the legal fees to her own attorneys as well as the lawyers of her conservators. Last year, she spent a million dollars in legal fees.

The singer has not commented on the #FreeBritney petition, although in recent years, she has begun telling fans that she is doing well.

Following her 2019 stay in a mental health hospital, Spears advised viewers not to trust "everything you read and hear." "And all of you who don't believe I share my own videos... you're mistaken," she said in an Instagram video.