Britney Spears’ father has leg amputated after infection

The Spears are not going through one of their best moments as a family. Its members are divided and barely keep a relationship between each other, and health is not their strong point either. As reported on Tuesday by TMZ and Page Six, Jamie Spears, Britney’s father, who for more than a decade was her legal guardian, has been suffering from a serious infection that led to the amputation of his leg about a month ago.

Spears, 71, spent several weeks hospitalized in the summer with a serious bacterial infection in a facility specifically for infectious patients, but in October he was spotted around his Louisiana home, looking much thinner. However, according to TMZ, he lost his leg a month ago, after undergoing five knee surgeries. As someone close to him tells Page Six, the reason was to try to contain a serious infection he had in his knee. Neither he nor his lawyers or family have spoken about it.

What is not clear is how Britney Spears’ relationship with her father, who kept her under strict guardianship for 13 years and until 2021, is currently going. As usual in the American tabloids, there are conflicting versions: those who claim that she is ready for a rapprochement and those who assure that nothing could be further from the truth, that the artist is on her own path of healing and that implies being away from Jamie. In her recently published book The Woman I Am, which hit bookstores on October 24, Spears spoke precisely about the hard years of her guardianship and her complex relationship with her father, who kept her isolated: “They kept me locked up against my will for months. I couldn’t go outside. I couldn’t drive a car. I had to give blood weekly. I couldn’t take a bath in private. I couldn’t shut the door to my room.”

“Too sick to choose my own boyfriend and yet somehow healthy enough to appear on sitcoms and morning shows, and to perform for thousands of people in a different part of the world every week,” Spears says in her book, claiming additionally that she was treated “like a bank robber,” putting her life “upside down.” She also accused her father of wanting to profit at all costs thanks to her. “From that point on, I began to think that he saw me as put on the earth for no other reason than to help their cash flow,” she states in her autobiography. The artist’s fortune is estimated at around $60 million, although she has assured that her father kept around 10% of it, something for which, a while ago, she intended to take him to court.

In her book, Spears says she still has physical and mental after-effects from that long period. “I don’t think my family understands the damage they caused me,” she writes. However, she does seem to be getting back on good terms with her mother, Lynne, who has been separated from her father for years. She was seen last weekend in Los Angeles, where Britney lives, who celebrated her 42nd birthday on Saturday, and there have been some photos of the two together on social media (although the singer has not published them). According to some media reports, her sister, actress Jamie Lynn Spears, was also invited to the birthday party, although she did not attend due to professional commitments — less than a week ago she left the reality show I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here, which is being filmed in Australia. The two have been at war for years, as Britney has accused her of taking advantage of her name and fame to carve out her own, without ever helping her. “My so-called support system has hurt me deeply,” the artist went so far as to say. During her participation in the survival reality show, she spoke about her older sister. “I love her. Me and her throw down. The world’s seen that. I’ve learned to stop talking about it publicly, but you know what, families fight. Listen, we just do it better than most.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition