Britney Spears's Longtime Attorney, Sam Ingham, Is Also Resigning

Along with manager Larry Rudolph and Bessmer Trust, Ingham seems eager to walk away from Spears's 13-years-long conservatorship.

By Emily Alford  |  July 6, 2021 | 7:15pm
EntertainmentEntertainment
Britney Spears's Longtime Attorney, Sam Ingham, Is Also Resigning
Image:Rich Fury (Getty Images)

Following this weekend’s explosive New Yorker expose, which provided a complete timeline of Britney Spears’s conservatorship and the reported resignation of Britney Spears’s longtime manager Larry Rudolph, the attorney appointed to Spears back in 2008, Sam Ingham, will also reportedly soon be relinquishing his duties.

According to TMZ, Ingham is upset over Spears’s June 23 testimony in which she told a judge that she was never informed by Ingham that she had the right to advocate for herself: “Ma’am, I didn’t know I could petition the conservatorship to end. I honestly didn’t know that,” Spears told Judge Brenda Penny.

But other reports suggest that Spears’s cluelessness over her own freedoms were by design. The New Yorker reports one particularly damning tidbit in which Ingham, who is paid $520,000 per year by Spears, seemingly conspired with a different judge to keep her from getting married:

“In one hearing, according to the Times, Goetz, the judge, told him that she didn’t recall an order specifically preventing Spears from getting married, but that he “may not want to tell her that.” Ingham replied, ‘Somehow, that did not come up in the conversation.’”

On July 1, Bessemer Trust, which acts as co-conservator along with Spears’s father, Jamie Spears, also announced that the firm was ending its role in the conservatorship. Ingram brought Bessmer Trust into the arrangements in November 2020k, and in a court petition, the company maintained that it was under the impression that the conservatorship was voluntary until Spears’s testimony.

Also leaving Spears’s employ is her manager of 25 years, Larry Rudolph, who says he has not spoken with Spears in more than two years:

“It has been over 2 1/2 years since Britney and I last communicated, at which time she informed me she wanted to take an indefinite work hiatus. Earlier today, I became aware that Britney had been voicing her intention to officially retire,” Rudolph wrote in an email to Jodi Montgomery, who acts as personal conservator to Spears, along with Jamie Spears.

Rudolph has been saying as much since 2019, after Spears canceled her Vegas residency:

“As the person who guides her career — based on the information I and all of the professionals who work with her are being told on a need-to-know basis — from what I have gathered it’s clear to me she should not be going back to do this Vegas residency, not in the near future and possibly never again,” Rudolph said at the time.

Another hearing around Spears’s conservatorship is set for July 14. It is unclear if Ingham will continue to represent her in that hearing.

 
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