Britney Spears Asked If She Was 'Happy' Under Conservatorship In Unaired 2016 Clip

Pop star Britney Spears made it very clear how unhappy she was in her conservatorship in a resurfaced clip.

The "Oops!... I Did It Again" singer was subject to a court-ordered conservatorship that lasted from February 2008 to November 2021.

In 2016, about five years before she was freed from her controversial 13-year conservatorship, the Princess of Pop appeared on "The Jonathan Ross Show" to promote her new album, "Glory." During the interview, she brought up how the conservatorship impacted her creative process. Unfortunately, her comments never aired, as her team did not allow her to publicly discuss her conservatorship at that time.

An ITV special that aired on November 9 looked back at several memorable moments from the show, including a conversation with Britney Spears. During the "Special Guests" segment, host Jonathan Ross asked the pop star, “The new album, you are more involved in this musically, I understand, than previous ones? So you’ve taken control. You’re more in control of your music than before? Why did it take you so long? Why did you wait ’til now to do it?”

“Well, um, there’s a lot of reasons, but I won’t get into the whole story,” Britney said in response, as per Page Six.

Ross admitted that he was aware of "a lot" of her history, including a public breakdown in 2007 that featured her shaving her head and reminded her that she did not "have to go over" anything that she did not want to.

“Since the conservatorship … I felt like a lot of the things were planned for me to do and, you know, being told what to do," Britney replied. "And I was just like, for this [album], I want to make it my baby, and I want to do it myself, and I was very strategic about the way I did it, and, um, yeah, that’s why it means so much to me.”

When Ross asked if she was "happy" and in a "good place" after being placed under the conservatorship, she replied, "Yes sir."

The "Toxic" singer publicly got to discuss her conservatorship in her memoir, "The Woman In Me," which was released in October 2023. “I even mentioned the conservatorship on a talk show in 2016, but somehow, that part of the interview didn’t make it to the air,” she wrote in the book. “Huh. How interesting.”

The tell-all memoir includes everything from her career highlights and her start on "The Mickey Mouse Club" to her high-profile relationships, including Justin Timberlake. That being said, the book barely mentions her relationship with "Special Ops: Lioness" actor Sam Asghari. The two started dating after meeting on the set of her "Slumber Party" music video in 2016 and married in June 2022, only a few months after her conservatorship ended.

In August 2023, the former personal trainer filed for divorce, citing "irreconcilable differences" as the reason for the split according to court documents obtained by The Blast.

The pop star's memoir also touched on what she experienced throughout her lengthy conservatorship, including the feeling that she "became a robot" in order to please those around her.

“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.”

The "Crossroads" actress went on to say, “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."

“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. 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," she added. "They wanted to take away that specialness and keep everything as rote as possible. It was death to my creativity as an artist.”