After a Los Angeles judge’s ruling to extend Britney Spears’ conservatorship until Feb. 1, 2021, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has publicly reached out to the pop star to offer their assistance.
“People with disabilities have a right to lead self-directed lives and retain their civil rights,” the nonprofit organization tweeted earlier in the week, on Aug. 19. “If Britney Spears wants to regain her civil liberties and get out of her conservatorship, we are here to help her.”
On Aug. 23, the organization shared an article published on aclu.org, titled “How Conservatorship Threatens Britney Spears’ Civil Rights.”
Alongside the link, the ACLU revealed that “Conservatorships can result in serious financial, physical, or emotional abuse.”
A Conservatorship “is the court weighing into the person’s life and saying you, as a person with a disability, are no longer able to make decisions about yourself and livelihood — such as where you live, and how you support and feed yourself — and we are putting someone else in charge of making those decisions. Because it’s such an extreme step to take, it’s supposed to be a last resort,” Zoe Brennan-Krohn, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Disability Rights Project, explained in the report.
“We don’t know if Britney Spears identifies herself as a person with disabilities, or what, if any, diagnoses she has received,” Brennan-Krohn said. “But by virtue of being under a conservatorship, we know that the court has determined that she is disabled, and has stripped away her civil rights because of that disability. So it’s inherently a civil rights/civil liberties issue.”
“What we don’t know is what the info the court had, what Britney has said about what she wants specifically, what other options have been tried, or what her lawyers have said. So while it’s possible that this is an example of a thoughtful conservatorship that was implemented as the last resort and is being reviewed carefully, thoroughly, and regularly, that is not the norm for conservatorships, and it appears inconsistent with what we see of Britney publicly,” the organization attorney continued.
Before the hearing (Aug. 17), the singer’s lawyer, Samuel Ingham, filed a motion on the singer’s behalf to remove her father as her conservator.
“This issue is getting attention right now because of Britney Spears’ fame,” Brennan-Krohn said in the ACLU article. “But she is only one of untold thousands nationwide under or at risk of guardianship or conservatorship.”
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