Britney Spears Has Officially Requested Her Dad’s Removal From Her Conservatorship

Britney Spears is one step closer to getting out from under her dad’s thumb—one of many obstacles to ending her conservatorship for good.

On Monday, Mathew S. Rosengart, Spears’s new lawyer, submitted new court filings formally requesting that Jamie Spears be removed from his client’s conservatorship. Rosengart is arguing that it’s in Spears’s “best interest” for the judge to approve his request, especially given the “serious questions … concerning Mr. Spears’s potential misconduct, including conflicts of interest, conservatorship abuse and the evident dissipation of Ms. Spears’s fortune.”

These “serious questions” became particularly urgent when Spears testified in court last month, telling a Los Angeles probate judge that she was “traumatized” by the legal arrangement, and that her father and everyone else involved in maintaining her conservatorship “should be in jail.” During the bombshell hearing, Spears also raised the issue of the conservatorship barring her from choosing her own lawyer, an argument that undoubtedly helped her secure Rosengart earlier this month. (Along with the fact of her longtime court-appointed attorney resigning.) A judge signed off on Spears’s decision to hire Rosengart on July 14.

When Spears tapped the high-powered entertainment lawyer, the New York Times noted that his hiring “would signal a drastic change in the handling of the case.” Monday’s filings seems to already prove that thesis—and they promise even more drastic changes to come. In addition to Rosengart’s request to remove Jamie Spears as conservator (and appoint a public accountant to take his place), Rosengart foreshadowed future legal action to end the conservatorship all together, and eventually press charges against the elder Spears.

“There might well come a time,” Rosengart wrote in Monday’s court documents, “when the court will be called upon to consider whether the conservatorship should be terminated in its entirety and whether—in addition to stripping his daughter of her dignity, autonomy and certain fundamental liberties—Mr. Spears is also guilty of misfeasance or malfeasance warranting the imposition of surcharges, damages or other legal action against him.”