In a new twist to the Britney Spears story, the pop icon's sister posted a video on Instagram, saying that now that her sister had clearly spoken about her situation, she could follow her lead and express herself.
"Since the day I was born, I have only loved and adored my sister," Jamie Lynn Spears said. "I don't care if she wants to run away to a rain forest and have a zillion babies in the middle of nowhere, or if she wants to come back and dominate the world as she has done so many times before, because I have nothing to gain nor lose either way," she added. She also said she was not affected by the situation because, as the pop star's sister, she was "only concerned about her happiness."
"Maybe I didn't support her the way she'd like me to, with a hashtag on a public platform," Jamie Lynn Spears said. "But," she added, "I have supported my sister long before there was a hashtag." She said she was speaking for herself, not her family.
Shortly after Jamie Lynn Spears' video went online, fans of her pop star sister began to tweet their reactions to the video under #FreeBritney. Some fans accused the younger Spears of "leeching off” her sister and also demanded that Netflix drop the actor from its series Sweet Magnolias, in which she acts.
Aguilera voices support
Britney Spears got some much-needed support from her contemporary Christina Aguilera, who became famous around the same time. In a post featuring very young versions of herself and Spears, Aguilera wrote: "These past days I've been thinking about Britney and everything she's going through. It is unacceptable that any woman, or human, wanting to be in control of their own destiny might not be allowed to live life as they wish.”
Spears has been dominating the news since she said she would like to personally address the court and report on her conservatorship arrangement with her father, Jamie. The 39-year-old Spears told a Los Angeles judge on June 23 that her father had been abusive, making her work without breaks, constantly monitoring her and forbidding her from removing a birth control device so she could try to have a baby.
Spears' legal arrangement, called a conservatorship, began in 2008. The arrangement allowed her father to control the singer's person and later her finances. The conservatorship began after the star suffered a mental breakdown, including attacking reporters' vehicles and shaving her head. After a year's break, Britney Spears made a comeback, releasing several albums and performing at so-called "residencies" in Las Vegas.
Spears began the process of removing her father from conservatorship last year after the star cancelled her Domination residency in Las Vegas in 2019, prompting fans to suspect that something in her life was amiss and demanding that the singer be freed from her father's control.