Britney Spears Says She Became a “Child-Robot” Under Her “Soul-Crushing” Conservatorship

While fans may have to wait a few more days until they can get their hands on Britney Spears’s highly-anticipated memoir, The Woman in Me (out Oct. 24), the pop star and former child actress is wasting no time opening up about her “soul-crushing” conservatorship ahead of its release.

In a new interview with People, Spears got candid about navigating her career and conservatorship in the public eye, which occurred in 2008 after the court granted her father Jamie control over her financial and personal affairs. 

“Over the past 15 years or even at the start of my career, I sat back while people spoke about me and told my story for me,” she told the publication. “After getting out of my conservatorship, I was finally free to tell my story without consequences from the people in charge of my life.”

In addition to reflecting on her journey present-day, Spears also delved into her story like never before by sharing an excerpt from her memoir where she described feeling like a “child-robot.”

“I became a robot. But not just a robot — a sort of child-robot,” her excerpt read. “I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself. The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”

She continued, “This is what’s hard to explain, how quickly I could vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom. There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl; but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult.”

Britney then explained that this eternal battle caused the woman in her to be “pushed down for a long time,” adding that it contributed to the “death of [her] creativity as an artist.”

“They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time,” she shared. “I felt like I was being deprived of those good secrets of life — those fundamental supposed sins of indulgence and adventure that make us human. They wanted to take away that specialness and keep everything as rote as possible. It was death to my creativity as an artist.”

The Woman in Me will hit bookshelves everywhere on Oct. 24.