Britney Spears celebrated the legal end of her conservatorship with a “real” glass of wine.
“Eventually you will come to understand that love heals everything and that is all there is,” Spears, 42, wrote via Instagram on Friday, April 26, alongside a photo of a 2019 bottle of Norton Malbec. “And REAL wine feels extremely nice as well ???? !!! Psss first time with real wine ???? Jesus f–king Christ !!!”
Her conservatorship required weekly drug tests and forbade her from drinking alcohol, she claimed in a June 2022 Instagram that has since been deleted, per Business Insider. Spears’ latest photo, however, came the same day Us Weekly confirmed that the pop star had settled her lawsuit with her estranged father, Jamie Spears, over her conservatorship.
“It has been our honor and privilege to represent, protect, and defend Britney Spears, Ms. Spears is and always will be an icon and a brilliant and brave artist of historic and epic proportion,” Britney’s attorney Mathew Rosengart said in a statement to Us on Friday. “Although the conservatorship was terminated in November 2021, her wish for freedom is now truly complete.”
Per Rosengart, the settlement means that Britney will no longer need to “attend or be involved with court or entangled with legal proceedings” going forward. The statement read, “Britney Spears won when the court suspended her father, and Britney Spears won when her fundamental rights and civil liberties were restored.”
Britney’s estate was under the control of her father, 71, for 13 years before her conservatorship, which made Jamie in charge of her finances and person, was terminated in November 2021. It began in 2008 after Britney went through a series of public struggles following her divorce from Kevin Federline. (The two share sons Sean, 18, and Jayden, 17.)
In her 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me, Britney described feeling like a “child-robot” under the control of her father for more than a decade.
“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.”
Jamie, for his part, doesn’t view the conservatorship in quite the same way. “Not everybody’s going to agree with me. It’s been one hell of a time,” he told the Daily Mail in December 2022. “But I love my daughter with all my heart and soul. Where would Britney be right now without that conservatorship? And I don’t know if she’d be alive. I don’t. For protecting her, and also protecting [her two teenage sons], conservatorship was a great tool.”
