Jamie Spears, Britney’s father, is in ‘very serious’ condition due to a bacterial infection

Jamie Spears, Britney Spears’s father and archenemy, has been having health issues. As confirmed by People and Page Six, the man who was the artist’s conservator for over a decade has been hospitalized for several weeks because of a serious bacterial infection. The illness was severe enough to require surgery. Spears was then admitted to a facility specifically for infectious patients and intense hospital care, but he has since been seen at his Louisiana home. The illness was “very serious,” sources close to him say, but he is on the road to recovery and out of danger.

Apparently, Jamie Spears has been ill for weeks. In August, several media reported that he had to undergo knee replacement surgery. He had that operation once before in the mid-2000s, but it needed to be done again. That was when he was seen at clinics and hospitals more frequently; he had also clearly lost a significant amount of weight.

Over the years, Jamie Spears has become the target of his most famous daughter’s complaints; in addition to Britney, he has two other children, actress Jamie Lynn Spears and film producer Bryan Spears. Jamie kept the singer under a legal and economic conservatorship for over 13 years, which prevented the performing artist from leading her life and pursuing her career as she wanted. Britney explained that situation at the trial in which she sought her freedom from her father’s conservatorship; she has also said as much on social media. The Toxic singer was under her father’s conservatorship between 2008 and 2021.

A movement calling for her release started in 2019, and little by little Britney began raising her voice and making it clear that Jamie was keeping her in personal, professional and economic confinement. In June 2021, the singer told the court that her father “should be in prison.” She then recounted that she had to go “three times a week to the psychiatrist” and was forced to wear an IUD, despite the fact that she wanted to get married and have a baby. She described the entire conservatorship as “abusive.” In August of that year Jamie Spears gave up his conservatorship and in September the judge permanently revoked it.

Jamie Spears charged about $16,000 per month for the conservatorship of his daughter, who has an estimated net worth of over $60 million (about €57 million). During the final years of his conservatorship, testimonies and documentaries shed light on some of the practices he used with his daughter. For example, The New York Times reported that the family patriarch hired a security company to control and monitor all of Britney’s communications, from calls to photos, notes, videos and text messages, so he knew what information she sent and received from her mother, friends and Sam Asghari, her boyfriend at the time (she since married and divorced him). In fact, according to the staff that monitored her, Jamie was especially interested in knowing about Britney’s romantic life, her partners and whether they were “a bad influence” on her.

After her father’s conservatorship was revoked, Britney and Jamie began a bitter battle. She accused him of wanting to keep $2 million of hers after the trial. For his part, he claimed that he didn’t “know if she’d be alive” without the conservatorship after she experienced a serious mental breakdown in the late 2000s. “For protecting her, and also protecting [her] kids, conservatorship was a great tool. Without it, I don’t think she would have got [her] kids back,” he said late last year in an interview with the Daily Mail. He was referring to the singer’s two sons with dancer Kevin Federline, Sean Preston and Jayden James; at present, neither Jamie nor Britney herself, to her regret, have a relationship with them now. “She was broke. She had no money whatsoever. The conservatorship set [up] a resource where she could get back financially. And, you know, we worked – and she worked – and she got herself straight up financially,” Jamie said of the artist at the time.

However, Britney has announced that she intends to take her father to court to recover the money that, she claims, he kept. She is still at odds with him, and they have no known relationship, although the summer tabloids suggested that there may have been some rapprochement between them. Britney recently took a vacation with friends to an island paradise and returned to her home in Los Angeles. A few days ago, she frightened her fans by dancing with knives — she said they were fake — and has not spoken about her father’s health. We will have to wait until the end of the month to learn more about her firsthand account of their relationship; her memoir, The Woman in Me, will hit bookstores on October 24.

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