For weeks now, Britney Spears fans have been peddling viral conspiracy theories that the singer—who has been free from her conservatorship for about a year—is being held hostage, or even dead, after aggressively over-analyzing her recent social media posts. Their theorizing seems to have reached a fever pitch this week: On Wednesday, a spokesperson for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office had to confirm to PageSix that Spears is safe, and said that the office had received a number of calls from concerned fans.
“I can confirm that we did get calls into our dispatch, and essentially, I can confirm that we don’t believe that Britney Spears is in any kind of harm or any kind of danger,” the spokesperson said. They didn’t specify how many calls they received, and said they couldn’t share more information, since the situation is a privacy issue. “I can’t confirm or deny that deputies went to her house,” the spokesperson added, “but we don’t believe that Britney Spears is in any kind of harm or danger at this point.”
Over the last several days, a certain kind of Spears fans have posted TikToks in which they appear to call the police to request a wellness check for the singer. In one now-deleted TikTok, a fan looks like she’s on the phone and says she’s “worried about the physical safety of a resident in your area,” and cites Spears’ “suspicious activity online and now her account has been deleted.”
As Jezebel reported last month, TikTok has become a hotbed for conspiracy theories about Spears’ safety. Some users claim Spears never even returned from her honeymoon with husband Sam Asghari in July, sparking the viral #WhereIsBritney hashtag. The videos pull wild, outlandish “evidence” from anywhere you can imagine. A number of TikToks shared shortly after Spears deactivated Instagram last month speculated that recent posts from her and Asghari actually feature a body double of Spears. Some videos contend that a post appearing to show Spears at Nobu in December isn’t real and was edited to include her, citing the apparent messiness of her hair—if that gives you any idea of the seriousness of these TikTokers’ claims. Another theory posits that Spears has never had control of her Instagram account, even after her conservatorship was lifted in November 2021, and whoever does have control of the account now purposefully posts questionable content to coincide with developments in her ongoing legal fight against her dad, her former conservator.
That some of her fans are now apparently calling law enforcement and demanding wellness checks on Spears takes their interest to frankly disturbing lengths. As writer Gerrick Kennedy pointed out on Wednesday, it seems like “Britney’s fans are harassing and stalking her in this manner, after proclaiming how badly they wanted her free.” She is, in effect, being targeted and policed by #FreeBritney fans, whose obsession with her life and, more specifically, their baseless perceptions of it, is now prompting literal police intervention.
The Ventura County Sheriff’s spokesperson didn’t say whether officers performed a wellness check on Spears. But in the event that they did, I cannot imagine anything more jarring, invasive, and violating if I were Spears than police showing up at my door—after years and years of being surveilled and controlled—because fans were speculating about my social media posts.
As I’ve previously written, I’ll never fault her fans for being concerned about her safety—she was in a conservatorship that policed every aspect of her life for 13 years. And for a very long time, her father and others in charge of the conservatorship did a pretty decent job at making everything look OK. But as Spears testified in 2021, throughout the conservatorship, she was denied time with her children, forced into abusive rehabilitation centers, and required against her will to keep an IUD in.
Given everything that Spears has already been through, it’s cruel for her fans to continue to subject her to such scrutiny. She deserves nothing but freedom, safety, and the space to be herself at this point. Viral conspiracy theories about whether she’s even alive, as well as torrents of calls to police on her behalf, are extremely counterproductive to that.