Pop star Britney Spears is refusing to pay USD$663,202.84 in her mother’s legal fees incurred during Spears’ more than 13-year conservatorship.
According to Variety, Spears’ attorney, Mathew Rosengart, filed new court documents asking the judge to deny a petition by Spear’s mother, Lynne Spears, that requested her daughter pay the fees.
The objection was filed on Tuesday, ahead of a Wednesday hearing at which no decision was made.
In the filing, Rosengart claims Lynne Spears has “no legal authority” to make a request for payment, as she was a third party to the conservatorship, which was held by Spears’ father, Jamie Spears.
Lynne Spears filed the request on Nov. 1, 2021.
Spears’ conservatorship was terminated on Nov. 12, 2021.
Protesters celebrate at the #FreeBritney Termination Rally at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse on November 12, 2021 in Los Angeles, California.
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Attorneys for Lynne Spears claim it was the effort of the singer’s mother and her lawyers that improved Spear’s life under the conservatorship.
In the legal request for Spears to pay the bill, representation for Lynne Spears argues she and her attorneys became “involved to help Britney free herself from what she saw as a very controlling existence.”
Her attorneys also allege they were hired by Lynne Spears to “help Britney achieve independence from her conservator father.”
However, Spears has publicly claimed different, writing in a since-deleted Instagram post from November, “My dad may have started the conservatorship 13 years ago, but what people don’t know is that my mom is the one who gave him the idea.”
In the documents filed by Rosengart, he writes that Spears had financially supported her family for many years. He also claims Spears’ father had especially benefitted from the conservatorship.
The documents allege Jamie Spears “enriched himself as conservator, receiving more than $6 million from Britney Spears’s estate in compensation, ‘fees and commissions,’ profiting handsomely from her very hard work (even though he was a fiduciary, not her legal, management, or talent representative).”
The filing also claims Lynne Spears was supported financially throughout the singer’s conservatorship.
“Lynne Spears has for at least a decade resided in a large, expensive house owned by Britney Spears in Kentwood, La., for which her daughter has also continuously — and generously — paid Lynne Spears’s utilities, telephone services, insurance, property taxes, landscaping, pool work, pest control, repairs and maintenance, totaling approximately $1.7 million,” the filing states.
Britney Spears was a 26-year-old new mother at the height of her career when her father established the conservatorship, at first on a temporary basis, in February 2008 after a series of public mental health struggles.
Though no official decision was made in Wednesday’s hearing, the next hearings are set for July, where this issue — among others — will be discussed.
— with files from The Associated Press
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