Britney Spears Reveals The First Time She Learned About The #FreeBritney Movement

Pop star Britney Spears is reflecting on the first time that she ever heard about the #FreeBritney movement.

The movement was created to put an end to her court-ordered conservatorship, which started in February 2008 following her public mental health breakdown. The conservatorship was not struck down until November 2021, although Britney had been trying to fight the conservatorship ever since 2018.

In an excerpt from "The Woman In Me" released by People magazine on Friday, Britney reveals that she learned about the #FreeBritney movement while she was in rehab. While pushing back against her court-ordered conservatorship in 2018, she was subject to more mental health evaluations and tests that also included a brief stay in rehab. “My father said that if I didn’t go, then I’d have to go to court, and I’d be embarrassed,” she wrote, claiming that her father told her that he would make her look like an "idiot" if she didn't do what he said.

The Beverly Hills facility where she stayed costs a whopping $60,000 per month. While she was there, she was prescribed lithium and was only given one hour of television before her bedtime, which was at 9 p.m. Britney reflects on the experience in her book, although she has discussed it before on social media. “They kept me locked up against my will for months,” she wrote in her memoir. “I couldn’t go outside. I couldn’t drive a car. I had to give blood weekly. I couldn’t take a bath in private. I couldn’t shut the door to my room.”

One night in the facility, a nurse showed her videos of her fans organizing and protesting against her conservatorship. “That was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my life,” Britney wrote. “I don’t think people knew how much the #FreeBritney movement meant to me, especially in the beginning.”

In another excerpt from her memoir released by People magazine earlier this week, the "Toxic" singer said that the conservatorship was the "death to my creativity" as an artist and claimed that she felt like a "robot" when being forced to perform during that time period.

“I became a robot. But not just a robot — a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself,” she wrote. “The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.” She also stated that she felt "like a shadow of myself" under the conservatorship.

“This is what’s hard to explain, how quickly I could vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom. There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl; but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult,” she continued.

“The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time," she added. "I felt like I was being deprived of those good secrets of life — those fundamental supposed sins of indulgence and adventure that make us human. They wanted to take away that specialness and keep everything as rote as possible. It was death to my creativity as an artist.”

In an email interview with People magazine released a week ahead of her memoir, Britney explained why she was ready to tell her story for the first time. “Over the past 15 years or even at the start of my career, I sat back while people spoke about me and told my story for me. After getting out of my conservatorship, I was finally free to tell my story without consequences from the people in charge of my life,” she wrote. “It is finally time for me to raise my voice and speak out. And my fans deserve to hear it directly from me. No more conspiracy, no more lies — just me owning my past, present, and future.”

Britney Spears' memoir "The Woman In Me" is scheduled for release on Tuesday, October 24, 2023.