Arts & Entertainment

‘Where Is Britney Spears?’ by Rebecca Jennings

By on • ( Leave a comment )
On November 12, 2021, Britney Spears was released from a 13-year conservatorship, and most of the Free Britney fandom — who had been sounding the alarm bells on the pop star’s situation for years — moved on with their lives. But for a certain subset, her freedom was just another conspiracy theory. What if, they wondered, the Spears who posted regularly on Instagram wasn’t her at all? What if she was still in a secret conservatorship, and the Spears we saw out in the world was a body double or an AI recreation? For this report, a collaboration with Vox, Rebecca Jennings went down the rabbit hole with Free Britney 2.0, as she calls it, in a probing look at how their fan activism has, in some ways, mimicked the type of monitoring that defined the conservatorship.

—Gazelle Emami, culture editor, New York

‘Where Is Britney Spears?’ After her conservatorship ended, some of her fandom latched on to a new theory: What if she had never been freed at all?

Photo: Hugo Yu
Read the full story

More From Today
The end of legacy admissions at elite colleges might be in sight, but Sarah Jones argues that our nation’s deep-seated inequalities mean wealthy students will still have the advantage in getting into the Ivy League. 
READ MORE »
For the Cut, Maggie Lange speaks to Renée Rapp, who paused her acting career to make pop music, about playing mean girls, finding her own sound, and coming out as bisexual. 
READ MORE »
Now that incandescent lightbulbs have officially been banned, revisit Tom Socca’s quest to figure out why LED bulbs — the only kind you can now buy — look so bad. 
READ MORE »
Introducing The City Desk, a weekly newsletter about New York. Sign up to get it every Thursday.
Get The Newsletter

Categories: Arts & Entertainment

Leave a Reply