Whoa! That almost looked like the old BS for a second. I don’t know whose body that is, but it sure don’t look like the modern Brit’s. Photoshoppp.
Anyway, the article that will come out in the March 2008 issue is super long, albeit very interesting.
So grab yourself a venti frap, some cheetos, and enjoy.
1. The Paps
Christmas lights dangle from tree branches in front of the Raffles L’Ermitage, the Beverly Hills hotel where Britney Spears slept last night—and where the paparazzi who keep watch over her now sit waiting. Although she owns a mansion in L.A., she often crashes in hotels because, the press speculate, her cupboards at home are bare: She likes to order room service. Spears is the only celebrity in the world under photographers’ 24-hour watch, a surveillance mode usually reserved for prisoners and suicides. Some of the core group of 15 or so lensmen who call themselves “her paps” pass the stakeout hours online, chatting with women via wireless laptop connections. Some smoke pot. Felix, the team captain for X17, the paparazzi agency with the closest ties to Britney, occasionally looks down at his phone to find a text message from Sam Lutfi, Spears’s confidant and de facto manager since last summer. Felix reads aloud: “She is inside.”
“Britney is money,” says another X17 photographer, standing next to the BMW that pictures of Britney have bought him. Someone tells the story of the day they followed her halfway to Las Vegas. She got takeout from Taco Bell at a rest stop in the desert. Then she turned the car around and drove home. “Britney is crazy,” says another, bemused.
We have been waiting since about 10 A.M., and the thrill, at 8:39 P.M., as two hotel security guards appear at the entrance to the garage, is libidinal: When Britney’s 612-horsepower Mercedes SL65 AMG shoots out of the driveway, rips west on Burton Way and up Foothill Road, it’s sweet release.
Britney drives like a rabbit being chased across a field. Trailed by 15 cars, she signals right, then turns left. Glides into a left-turn lane, makes a right. On Wilshire Boulevard, slows from 50 miles per hour down to 15, then bangs an illegal U-turn into brake-screeching traffic. The driver in the lead mutters, “Bitch.”
Then he’s cut off by a Mercedes SL500 steered by Adnan Ghalib, a daredevil-fearless paparazzo who usually rides at the front of the pack.
If Britney has been in hiding all day and her paps have gotten no pictures, they hope for a red light at the top of Coldwater Canyon, the last intersection before her house. Tonight they’re lucky. Britney stops; Ghalib pulls his Benz into the oncoming traffic lane, slams into park and the gang crowds around her car for just less than a minute.
Thus surrounded, Britney, wearing the same outfit she wore last night, doesn’t look at the photographers but focuses on a point in the air a few inches in front of her nose, slowly pivoting her head on the axis of her neck, clicks and flashes dicing her movement like a strobe. She seems to be basking, and she seems to be trapped. Even her vehicle looks resigned: A smashed headlight has been out for weeks, and she’s still driving on a spare tire from a flat she had in October. (Her paps changed it for her.)
When the light turns, the paps scramble back to their cars, Britney turns right, guns it and they let her go. The white car shrinks into the darkness, wriggling up Mulholland toward the gated community where she lives.
The Britney chase feels like a video game where, every moment, you’re sure you’re going to die; yet against all odds, despite all carelessness, nothing kills you. Even the photographers who do this every day admit that they’re scared by it. One X17 videographer warns, “Someone is going to get hurt, man.”
Without prompting, he mimes holding up a camera with one hand and dialing his phone with the other—explaining that the video of an accidental death cannot legally be sold, unless the cameraman can prove he was calling 911 at the same time. Clearly, he’s given this endgame some thought. There’s no way not to ask: Would a video of Britney’s death be the ultimate prize?
“That would be horrible,” he says. “No, no. Nobody wants that.”
2. The pop Star
Aside from Starbucks Frappuccinos, Britney’s primary nourishment nowadays is the attention of paparazzi, who slake the public’s unquenchable thirst for details of her travails. Britney has been a figure of fascination since her solo debut in 1999, back when she was everything a girl was, and wasn’t, supposed to be. The 17-year-old small-town Southern Christian Mouseketeer virgin-sexpot became a superstar—Lolita, Cinderella and Elvis Presley all in one—by tarting up a schoolgirl’s uniform and shimmying down the halls of a high school in the video for “ … Baby One More Time,” her first single. Britney’s image was a pop masterpiece, fashioned in her songs’ and videos’ provocative blend of innocence and experience. She grew into a Grammy-winning artist who, alone among female singers, debuted four consecutive albums (which, together, sold 75 million copies) at No. 1. Today, however, she’s become the undiluted essence of celebrity, and almost no one—not even Britney—seems much interested in her music. To promote her 2007 album Blackout, Britney did exactly one telephone interview, which lasted seven minutes. Disasters, not music, have become her product.
Steve Lunt, the A&R executive who steered her for most of her career, is baffled by the implosion. “It’s very upsetting to see what’s going on in her life,” he says. “She was always driven and focused. The most quietly, deceptively ambitious person you could meet. But when you lose your focus, it’s very hard to refocus.” Haltingly, Lunt adds, “You don’t know where this thing is going to go.”
For now, it’s off the rails. In the past 18 months, her transgressions, proven and alleged, have escalated beyond almost any in pop history. Next to Britney Spears, Courtney Love is Miss Manners. Since leaving her husband Kevin Federline in late 2006, she has flashed her vagina, shaved her head, physically attacked paparazzi and gone to rehab (twice). She has been charged with hit-and-run, effectively declared an unfit mother by the state of California and been fired by her lawyers (again, twice). She turned in the most disastrous performance of her career at MTV’s Video Music Awards show, got dumped by her management firm and has cleaned her hands of almost everyone who played any significant role in her first 25 years of life. She passes many days on what Ben Evansted, the paparazzo who took the most famous images of her genitals, calls “long drives to nowhere,” punctuated by stops at gas stations, tanning salons, drug stores, pet stores and fast-food restaurants. In December, OK! magazine reportedly paid $1 million for an interview with Britney’s mother, Lynne, and her sister, Jamie Lynn, in which the 16-year-old announced she was pregnant. When paps asked Britney what she thought of the news, she inadvertently revealed the degree of her estrangement from her family; with a scowl and a giggle, she said, “My sister’s not pregnant!”
If there was any remaining boundary between her public and private lives, it vanished just before Christmas, when she spent the night in a hotel with Adnan Ghalib, the alpha pap who works for a small agency called Finalpixx. Britney’s self-created Stockholm syndrome, it seemed, was consummated. Then, when it looked like things could not possibly get worse, police were called to Britney’s home when she refused to relinquish her two children after their scheduled visit on January 3. After a three-hour standoff, she was strapped to a gurney and taken by ambulance to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The next day, she lost all visitation and custody rights to her kids.
Lindsay is a lightweight, Paris is a shoe-in for Junior League, compared to Britney. Her mess has become tragedy. Where did things go wrong? Many outsiders blame her problems on drug abuse, a theory given some weight when the judge in her custody battle wrote of her “habitual, frequent and continuous use of controlled substances and alcohol.”
But in scores of interviews with her former friends and associates, a more complex account of her agonies takes shape. A business associate who helped her prepare for September’s VMAs performance says, “There’s obviously some substance-abuse issues going on … But even if, hypothetically, she was out the night before the VMAs doing blow and then took a Xanax to come down and then got drunk right before the show—even if she did that—even that wouldn’t explain the performance. She wouldn’t have done that if there weren’t some self-sabotage going on.” (Spears did not respond to interview requests from Blender.)
Britney once had an A-list team of publicists, managers, lawyers and handlers that rivaled any superstar’s. Now she’s essentially reduced that staff to one person: Sam Lutfi, a 33-year-old Hollywood gadabout with a questionable past, a couple of low-budget film credits as a producer and no apparent qualifications for his current position. A prominent former Spears adviser says that Lutfi “has the potential to cause enormous problems, to sink her deeper in the hole and exploit her in a lasting way.”
Like all child stars, Britney Spears has been exploited, with varying degrees of calculation, since her career began—so much so that it may be the kind of relationship in which she now feels most at home. “She got chewed up by this new celebrity culture and spat out, so it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for her,” says VH1 Executive Vice President Michael Hirschorn. “She really was turned into a lab rat.” While her troubles include substance abuse, pressure from public scrutiny and a failure to understand that actions have consequences, many who’ve been close to her over the years agree that her most basic problem is something else. “This goes deeper,” says Melinda Bell, a former member of her management team. “It has to do with something about love.”
3. the breadwinner
Jamie Spears, a contractor, and his wife, Lynne, a schoolteacher, were churchgoing people in the small town of Kentwood, Louisiana, when their daughter Britney was born. “They weren’t stage parents,” Steve Lunt says firmly. Yet from the time that 2-year-old Britney first asked to take dance lessons, her desire to perform has been the defining feature of her family’s life. Jamie had a drinking problem during Britney’s childhood (he’s now sober), and construction projects sometimes took him from his family for extended periods. That may have made it easier for Britney and Lynne to choose the gypsy life; when Britney was 10, she moved to New York with her mother to become an off-Broadway baby. She was a runner-up on Star Search the next year, and a regular on The New Mickey Mouse Club the year after that.
By 17, Britney was her family’s pillar of strength: Her record deal even saved her parents from bankruptcy. Lynne, as well as Britney’s brother, Bryan, were both on the girl’s payroll. “She was the breadwinner in her family,” says one former manager. “And when you know everyone’s living off you, you learn not to trust.” Moreover, again like most child stars, “she was never really taught how to live. Basic things: how to balance a checkbook, how things get done.”
Still, she made some very grown-up decisions, very early. Maybe the most grotesquely curious and controversial event of her early career was her rumored choice, at age 17, to undergo surgical breast enhancement. Speculation about the procedure triggered criticism and raised the question of whether she would actually make such an extreme, and extremely sexualizing, choice—or whether Britney Spears was being created as a sexual girl-golem by dirty old record execs. A publicist who knew her says the call was Britney’s and that the singer gave a startlingly simple explanation for her surgery at the time: “‘I work like a woman, everyone treats me like a woman, but I look like a girl.’”
“If that’s what she wanted, who would have told her no?” asks Eric Foster White, who produced or cowrote six songs on her first album, … Baby One More Time. It sold 20 million copies worldwide, and Jive Records released the follow-up, Oops! … I Did It Again, the next year. “You have to understand that there’s nobody in the equation who stood to benefit by giving it to her straight,” White says.
On her first concert tour, Britney cultivated little rituals of escape. She liked to read (The Celestine Prophecy was a favorite) and write in her prayer journal. Her other escape was a secret romance with Justin Timberlake, with whom she’d had a special connection since their Mickey Mouse Club days. Then it became public, and its eventual end only aggravated the snowballing confusion of her public and private lives. In 2002, she was devastated by their breakup—even though, he said, it was her infidelity with choreographer Wade Robson that ended their relationship. On a radio program, Timberlake talked about their sex life, and her image as a virgin was ruined. The breakup, according to those closest to Spears, began her personal collapse. “Ever since then,” says one friend, “she’s been mad at the world.”
Her rebound got ugly: reported cocaine use, flings with bad boys Fred Durst and Colin Farrell, and snubbing fans at premieres for her movie debut, Crossroads. (Despite the film’s critical failure, Oscar-winning producer Brian Grazer wanted to meet with her; but Britney flaked on their breakfast appointment.)
That year, she also parted ways with her co-manager, teen-pop heavyweight Johnny Wright, whose creative vision had helped shape her image (her other longtime manager Larry Rudolph, a lawyer, was the deal-maker and helped with her personal life and finances). And then she crossed another fateful line, French-kissing Madonna at the 2003 VMAs. “I remember watching that,” says one of her former handlers, “and thinking, All it is now is sensationalism. Tweens and moms were appalled. The shock value wasn’t worth it.”
4. The bride
“Funny as shit,” says a former Jive executive, when asked what he thought of Spears’s decision, one night in Las Vegas in 2004, to marry a childhood friend from Kentwood, Jason Alexander. “She doesn’t connect the dots sometimes,” he explains. “Everyone thinks you only do those things when you’re drunk or you’re high. Britney can do things like that stone-cold sober.” The wedding was annulled 55 hours later, and Alexander gave a tabloid a sexually explicit account of their brief marriage.
Later that year, when Spears had a one-night stand with an LFO backup dancer named Kevin Federline (nicknamed Meat Pole for his manhood), “it turned into a three-day stand at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” according to a Federline family friend. “All they did was have sex and order room service.” Afterward, “he called his brother Chris, like, ‘You’re not going to believe whose back I broke,’” and, the friend says, bragged that they hadn’t used condoms.
Britney invited Kevin to join her on a promotional tour in England, and though he didn’t have a passport, one was quickly procured. On the flight home, they got engaged, and then she bought herself a $50,000 engagement ring.
Britney’s romance with Kevin also intensified her affair with the paparazzi. Two fantasies of love—with a man, and with the public—joined when she took Kevin to the beach one afternoon to show off her new boyfriend to the world. The number of photographers trailing Britney doubled after Kevin came on the scene, and the value of a premium shot of her climbed 500 percent.
She was rich and famous. He was, as she put it, “normal.” She claimed to love this about him, but the discrepancy caused trouble from the start. Britney’s solution? Equalize their status by starring together in a reality show. Against all advice, Britney insisted, and the result, UPN’s Britney & Kevin: Chaotic, ran for five episodes.
“I knew it was bad for her,” says a source who was involved in the deal. “But I thought, Fuck it. I’ll make a lot of dough.”
“Chaotic destroyed the image that we had worked so carefully to create,” says one of her advisers at the time, who opposed the project. “She thought that if she showed the world everything, everyone would love her for it. What it did, instead, was make her look like white trash—and that is not what she is. She’s better than that. It created an appetite for this wild and crazy girl and created this spiral where nothing can satisfy that appetite.”
Chaotic, a withering mash of fart jokes, bull sessions and deadening sexual compulsiveness, was mostly filmed by Britney and Kevin with handheld cameras. It is porn without skin, reeking with the unacknowledged despair of people who have become things, even to themselves.
In a hotel room, Kevin asks, “How do you feel?”
Britney: “Great.”
Kevin: “Why do you feel great?”
Britney: “The sex is great.”
Kevin: “What else is great? Is it just the sex?”
Cut to an interview where Britney explains how she overcomes obstacles to intimacy with Kevin: “I’m not really good with just really being intimate one-on-one, and I think it helped me to have a camera there, instead of it just being me and him.”
5. The mommy
The couple had two children (Sean Preston, now 2, and Jayden James, 1; Federline has two previous children, with actress Shar Jackson). “She had this fantasy of being a wife and mother, so everything happened fast,” says one former handler, unsurprised that Britney and Kevin’s relationship quickly circled the drain. Kevin told friends of wild mood swings and fights, calling her “bi-polar”—eruptions sometimes triggered by the hours she spent jealously scouring the list of female “friends” on his MySpace page. Though sources close to the couple say Kevin was philandering and a bit of a freeloader, his experience with fatherhood also made him the more domestic spouse. “He was Mr. Mom,” changing diapers and rising early to cook breakfast, says a friend.
California child-welfare officials visited the couple’s home after receiving reports of negligence, supported by paparazzi photographs and video. To set the record straight, Britney sat for a tearful Dateline NBC interview with Matt Lauer. She did her own hair and makeup, wore a cheap outfit, chewed gum throughout the conversation and talked about how much she enjoys housekeeping. She was trying to show the world she was a regular girl and that her recent maternal mishaps—nearly dropping Sean outside a hotel, letting him ride in her lap instead of strapped in a car seat—had been unfairly magnified by relentless public scrutiny. But the interview, a PR disaster, only made her look more disconnected from reality.
That fall, Britney called former manager Larry Rudolph to New York for a meeting. (The two had parted ways around the time of Chaotic.) When he showed up, she announced she was divorcing Federline and wanted to rehire Rudolph and get back to work. Despite her best intentions, though, her discipline had waned, and as Thanksgiving approached, she went on a hedonistic, labia-flashing tear through Hollywood clubland with her new buddy Paris Hilton.
Last Valentine’s Day, an inner circle of family and friends gathered to persuade Britney to seek help for substance abuse, and she flew with Rudolph to a rehab facility in Antigua. The next day she checked out, returned to L.A., shaved her head, attacked a pap’s car with an umbrella and spent five days going wild before voluntarily checking into Promises rehab center in Malibu. She stayed for only 30 days of the center’s standard 45-day program and returned home in March.
She ended her rehabilitation early “because that would have required her to admit, in front of the world, that she had problems. That was the one thing she couldn’t do,” says one of Britney’s closest companions during this time, sounding eaten by frustration. “Is there anyone on the planet, except for Britney Spears, who cannot see that Britney has a problem? After that, she pushed her family, literally everyone, away.”
So, Britney was willing to let go of every intimate relationship she had, to avoid admitting to the abstract mass of “the public” that her life was a mess—even though everyone knew that her life was a mess?
“That would not be an unreasonable reading of the situation.”
A June divorce ruling in accordance with Britney and Kevin’s prenuptial agreement stipulated joint custody of the children. Federline’s lawyer, Mark Vincent Kaplan, challenged the financial settlement, which was in accordance with the prenup: a lump sum rumored to be about $1 million. In September, Britney agreed to give Kevin an extra $20,000 per month for the rest of his life.
On the same day Britney made this concession, Kaplan filed a challenge to the custody agreement. The court quickly gathered testimony of Britney’s odd behavior, ranging from classic Stupid Celebrity Shit (driving without a valid license) to hair-raisingly Freudian stories from a former bodyguard of “nudity by Ms. Spears, drug use and safety issues involving the children, post-rehab.” Within weeks, L.A. County Superior Court Commissioner Scott Gordon temporarily suspended Britney’s physical custody of the children. He ordered her to undergo random drug testing, mandated parenting classes for the couple, forbade them to drink alcohol within 12 hours of assuming physical custody of the kids and gave a pathetically rudimentary list of guidelines about how to behave with their boys: “Each party is restrained from making derogatory remarks about the other party and the other party’s family or significant other, either directly or indirectly, to the minor children, and from allowing anyone else to do so.”
Here, the relationship between the California court and the kangaroo court of online gossip took a bizarre twist. The week before Commissioner Gordon suspended Britney’s custody rights, he had decreed that the children “shall be transferred in a properly insured and registered vehicle, which shall be driven only by a properly insured driver who has a current and valid driver’s license.” Two days later, TMZ.com posted a photo of Britney, who had still not gotten a license, driving her children in Malibu.
The next day, Federline’s lawyer convinced the judge to suspend custody rights.
This was not, by far, Spears’s only violation of the court orders. She had blown off drug testing and parenting classes and had been seen drinking alcohol within 12 hours before picking up the boys. (TMZ posted video of her in a club that night.) But from this point on, the infinite feedback loop between her bad behavior and its coverage online was sealed. TMZ and X17online.com videos of Britney, taken in the months following her custody suspension, show her running stop signs and rolling over a pap’s foot. She bumps another pap with her car, wincing, “sorry, sorry, sorry” in a baby voice; then, when she cannot figure out how to exit a parking garage, looks pleadingly to the paps and they assist her. They pump her gas, guide her through everyday confusion at a fast-food drive-through window and often pick up her tab. Not without reason, she seems to think there’s no need to settle her own accounts. She plays the role that they expect her to play. In a Van Nuys filling station, she picks up a $1.39 Bic lighter and walks away with it, looking into the video cameras and saying, “I stole something! Oh, I’m bad. Ohhh!”
Of all the paparazzi agencies, X17 has emerged during the past year as the one with the closest relationship with Britney. Brandy Navarre, who owns X17 with her husband, François, tells a story of the day Britney went to a tanning salon and told her security man, “‘Get X17 for me.’ She goes into a private booth and she starts giving us this message she wants to put out to her fans. She affected this Valley-girl voice, and she basically told us that it was her mother and Larry Rudolph who forced her into rehab, but that she was never on drugs or alcohol. She knew we’d put it on the Web site unedited.”
Navarre also brags that X17 scored the first interview with Sam Lutfi: “We were the first people to come out with his name and who he was.” Navarre first received tips from “funny pseudonyms,” and then, “out of the blue,” she says. “Sam started telling me things … that the TMZs and the Us Weeklys of the world die for.” Where Britney is concerned, Lutfi became X17’s Deep Throat.
6. The wingman
When Sam Lutfi met britney last year, they were both going through transitions. She had begun distancing herself from all of her old intimates; he had been barred by a restraining order from contacting Danny Haines, a 29-year-old man from Orange County who had been his close friend for two years.
There are at least two other outstanding restraining orders against Lutfi. Documents for both cases demonstrate his violent temper. This third case, however, raises deeper and more chilling questions about Lutfi’s character, and about his relationship with Britney.
Danny Haines, who spoke exclusively with Blender, met Sam Lutfi on MySpace in the fall of 2005. Haines was at a low ebb when they met, he says. The bare outlines of his situation bear some resemblance to Britney’s: His professional life was adrift, his relationships with old friends and family were in disrepair and he had some secrets that he didn’t want anyone to know.
Lutfi was fun to be with. He claimed to be friends with celebrities from Kate Beckinsale to Roseanne Barr, and he seemed to know every nightclub bouncer in L.A. With Lutfi, Haines says, “it seemed like you could break all the rules.”
Their fun was fueled by long, confessional conversations in which Haines described his unsatisfying, distant relationships with his family. Lutfi’s account of his own background—he grew up in a tight-knit family in Woodland Hills, California, where his mother reportedly owns several gas stations—sounded ideal by comparison.
Haines says Lutfi wanted to know everything about him—every secret, every problem—and Haines complied. It seemed that nothing shocked Lutfi, even when Haines, who is straight, told him about some X-rated, homoerotic modeling he had done for a photographer he’d met online.
Haines remembers the night when Lutfi offered to straighten out his life: “He said, ‘I can help you. I can help your parents. But you need to be honest with me. If you’re lying to me about anything, I’ll know.’”
To Haines’s fractured ego, Lutfi’s social skills and emotional intelligence were magnetic. He encouraged Haines to “stand up for myself” and at the same time worked to become indispensable to him. Lutfi ingratiated himself with Haines’s family, acting as a go-between and informal counselor.
Haines says their relationship was not romantic or sexual but that Lutfi was more jealous than a lover. He could be supportive one day and vicious the next, leaving voicemails tracing extremes from “You’re a worthless motherfucker” to “I love you, man. I love you to death.” He says that although Lutfi also made some feckless gestures toward an old-fashioned con job—Haines claims Lutfi borrowed about $18,000 that he did not pay back, though Lutfi’s mother finally settled much of the debt—Lutfi reserved most of his energy for emotional blackmail and extortion. “Everybody hates you,” he wrote to Haines, suggesting that Haines should just kill himself: “Seriously, sleeping pills, LOTS of them … ” (Lutfi declined to comment for this story.)
When Haines finally cut the cord, Lutfi humiliated him. He e-mailed naked photographs of Haines to his family, friends, colleagues and employer. Then he texted and called incessantly, telling Haines he hoped his sister would be “raped to death,” according to the restraining order. In an e-mail about Haines’s mother (“that Mormon bitch”), Lufti wrote, “I hope Satan devours her flesh and bones,” and said he looked forward to the day when he would “piss on [her] burial.”
Such communications moved Haines to seek the restraining order, which also protects his mother from being contacted by Lutfi. A few months later, Haines says that Lutfi called his brother-in-law to say he’d met a celebrity whom he wanted to set Haines up with. Later, Haines saw photographs of Lutfi with Spears in the tabloids. In those pictures, Lutfi was wearing a bodybuilding shirt and baseball cap that he had taken from Haines.
Haines, whose relationship with Lutfi was the subject of a few obscure blog comments after Lutfi’s other restraining orders were reported in December, says that he subsequently received an e-mail from Lutfi’s sister’s address, which he read as a warning: “One of your friends is writing to some magazines about your history with my brother … I don’t think that’s wise for him to do.” The warning came with what sounded like a threat: “Those pictures and your history isn’t so positive either and I’m sure you wouldn’t want that to be public as well.”
Informed of the details of Haines’s relationship with Lutfi, Jamie and Lynne Spears, who declined to discuss Lutfi on the record, both expressed grave concern to Blender about his ongoing involvement in their daughter’s life and have encouraged Haines to go public with the story.
“If Sam’s not doing anything wrong with Britney, if he’s not worried about being exposed,” Haines asks, “why would his sister be saying, Don’t talk about my brother and his past?”
7. The worst person in the world
Britney showed at least a glimmer of sanity when, on Saturday, January 5, she reportedly ignored “Dr. Phil” McGraw, the TV therapist who surprised her at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, then spoke about the visit to Entertainment Tonight. But even he would have been an improvement on Lutfi, who, Haines says, described himself as an “unlicensed counselor” in the court hearing that led to the restraining order.
The symbiosis between stars and sleazebags is as old as show business. The story rarely has a happy ending (see Anna Nicole Smith), and talent alone saves no one (see Judy Garland). Lutfi’s personal history adds a frightening element to the unsavory task of forecasting Britney’s fate.
For countless observers, Britney’s latest unraveling brought that impulse to the surface. A Detroit radio station announced, then canceled, a “Britney Suicide-Watch” contest, inviting listeners to name the date for a $1,000 prize. Just shy of grave-dancing, Perez Hilton gloated that his Web site received an all-time high of more than 10 million hits on the day the star was hospitalized: “Thanks, Britney.”
Others voice what seem to be kinder thoughts. Just a few weeks before the January meltdown, Bonnie Fuller, chief editorial director of American Media Inc., which publishes Star magazine, told Blender that “everybody wants her to get better.” Then, asked to name her best-selling Spears cover story, Fuller answered, “BRITNEY HITS ROCK BOTTOM was a big one,” seemingly without irony.
“I think she’s really lost most of her fans’ sympathy,” Fuller continued. “She’s done the ultimate betrayal to her fans, by appearing to be a bad mother. That’s something that even the most steadfast fan has a problem with. You always want to think that your idols are essentially good. They may be misunderstood or misguided, may have fallen victim to addictions that they can’t control, but they’re basically good people.”
Britney became the tabloids’ wet dream by making herself the very image of a bad person. More than that: the worst person. There is, it seems, no limit to the number of things you can hate her for. She’s irresponsible, lazy, selfish, arrogant, stupid, tacky, rich and so depraved as to look almost subhuman. (Paris Hilton nicknamed her “the animal.”) She does not take care of herself, and still she could have sex with almost anyone she wants. She revels in her own violation and invites you to the orgy: “I can’t control myself/They want more/Well, I’ll give ’em more … ” she sings on Blackout.
After Britney’s catatonic VMAs performance of “Gimme More,” a short video called “Leave Britney Alone!” became a monster hit on YouTube. Chris Crocker, an androgynous actor from Tennessee, appeared on the verge of nervous breakdown, a lone voice crying out in her defense. It was a sequel to a video he had posted the previous week, “Back up, Britney haters!”: “I don’t just like Britney when she’s glitzy … I like Britney when she looks homeless. I like Britney when her hair extensions, her tracks are showing. I like Britney when her cootch is showing … Because I love BRIT. NEY. OK? Not the persona. The person. I love Britney for real reasons. I love Britney for Britney.”
Crocker, naturally, parlayed his YouTube fame into a deal for a reality show. There is no way of knowing how much of his screed was staged and how much was sincere. Yet the sentiment, like all fans’ feelings about celebrities, requires one fundamental correction: Chris Crocker can’t love the real Britney, because he does not know the real Britney.
Yet even the people who do know the real Britney don’t know her anymore. Her former manager Johnny Wright says, “I’m not pointing fingers, but I can’t believe that she woke up one morning and said, ‘I don’t want my family, or anyone else I knew, to be in touch with me anymore.’
“People say she needs to go to rehab. I think she just needs a friend—somebody not caught up in Hollywood, not looking for a paycheck. Somebody she trusts has to step up and break it down for her.”
When Wright worked with her, Britney had a personal assistant named Felicia Culotta. “She was her friend first, and she worked for peanuts. She had no other agenda than Britney’s well-being,” Wright says.
Recently he told her, “‘Felicia, you need to reach out to her.’”
Culotta’s answer was a measure of Britney’s isolation, and a sign of her peril. She said, “‘Johnny, they won’t let me in.’”
[Source]
According to Dlisted…Blender posted a job for a body double about a month ago…
” Britney/Blender
Rate: $500 a day
Shoot Dates: Either Friday 12/14 or Monday 12/17
“Photo double / Female / Caucasian / 18 - 25 ”
We are casting for a Britney Spears body double. You must have shoulder to medium length blonde hair. This person must also be in shape! 5′2″ to 5′5″. This will be a take off of a Bert Stern photograph of Marilyn Monroe in bed, from the last shoot before her death. Your face will not be shown in the final photograph/cover”
A body double to create a poor copy of Britney Spears as Marilyn Monroe. This is such a perfect symbolism of how much of a phoney Britney Spears truly is.
Too bad they had to use britney’s face……uugh!
Dude, just read the magazine cover, it’s not her body. She hasn’t looked like that since the late 90’s. Do at least a little research, like reading the pic, before posting something so asinine.
It’s just as I said. Britney has burned so many bridges and is so far gone, that one by one, all her former enablers are going to come out and tell what they know about her. And what they know is that she’s not a good person, her mental issues preceeded KFed, she willingly and knowingly works with the papz to make sure her pictures are taken everyday, and she refuses to listen to anyone.
get over yourself, you pathetic cunt….
oh wow, you just said what half of us have always thought. Balsy. Cue the babbling that I am sure Kelly will spew forth and prolong this mindless forum of self indulgent chatter indefinitely.
Oh poor whoever you are that you haven’t got a brain enough to actually join a debate like a mature adult. You got to call people names like a three year old child throwing a mindless temper tantrum. You and Britney can fight over the corner we stand you in while the adults continue talking. Amybe it’s past your bed time, poor, poor defeated you.
Only the fantards didn’t see this coming years ago.
Who’s calling who names? You can throw all out all the “mature” psychobabble you want, it doesn’t change the fact that if you behave like a cunt, you’ll get named as one.
The fantards is a name that we adopted here to separate the mature fans who are willing to accept the truth about Britney from those who like to lie and deny the truth.
You shouldn’t use the word cunt while defending Britney, the world’s most famous whore and cunt…seriously, pot calling the kettle black much. Just because a person speaks the truth doesn’t make them a bad person, it just means that you can’t handle the truth.
“you shouldn’t use the word cunt while defending Britney, the world’s most famous whore and cunt…seriously, pot calling the kettle black much?”
“You got to call people names like a three year old child throwing a mindless temper tantrum.”
Thank you Kelly, for proving my point.
Oh Sara, but Britney is a whore. She shows her vagina to the world because she is so desperate to save her failing career. I’m sorry that you don’t know what a whore is, but that’s it in a nutshell. The word whore has existed for thousands of years, not my fault. A woman, or a man for that matter, can and will be judged for selling sex when they have no other talent left. That is the road that Britney chooses each and every day. And if you are going to call me a cunt for speaking my mind when BRitney has done far, far worse, like putting frapps ahead of being a mother, and ecploiting herself to the papz and slepping with them for headlines, than she is also a cunt. But I can say these things and back them up with years of evidence of Britney being a selfish and conceited human being. You can make not point to defend her, because she gives you nothing to defend her for, so all you can do is take personal attacks against all those who do not worship the excrement that she dares to call her career. You proved your point by making a lousy argument and by committing the act you tried so desperately to call a sin. You are immature, ignorant, and in denial. Hold a press conference ten years from now when you finally wake up to the fact that your girl is among the walking dead.
You are by far, the most self-deluded fool out there. Where does it say that I support Britney just because I denounce you? You are a cunt. Why? Because you hate your gender enough to render enough horrific criticism of such that you come across as a deranged, bitter idiot. Take a step back and read your comments from the last 10 months. Smarts, dunnit?
Only a Britney supporter would be so desperate to lie and bend the truth to denounce me. If you weren’t that desperate then you would be capable of admitting that the evidence points to a little lost girl who never learned how to live a normal life…and by the way…was admitted to the hospital under a psychological hold for the second time in less than a month. If what I am saying is so wrong, then why would that happen?
Bitch has been photoshopped way to much. Oh and where are the frapps?!
And the sheet should be torn and stained with cheeto dust and lord knows what else. The cigarettes in the Mouse ears are perfect since she did smoke underage.
If britney had actually come into contact with it, the sheet should be burned. As for britney herself, IT’S TIME TO INVERT A BROWN PAPER BAG TO PLACE OVER HER HEAD AND WRITE ON THE OUTSIDE IN A BOLD BLACK SHARPIE:
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“A MEAN, SELFISH, STUPID B*TCH WHO WOULD RATHER BE FAMOUS THAN PROVIDE HER OWN CHILDREN WITH A GOOD HOME IS UNDER HERE…AND BY THE WAY, WE’RE DOING THE WORLD A BIG, BIG FAVOR BY HIDING HER FACE BEHIND THIS PAPER SACK, DON’T YOU KNOW”"
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However, the relief would only be temporary, BEFORE BRITNEY’S MASSIVE FOREHEAD SWELLS TO EVEN GREATER PROPORTIONS AND RIPS THROUGH THE BAG LIKE A POUND OF C-4 EXPLOSIVES THAT HAS BEEN WRAPPED IN TOILET PAPER! I’M TELLING YOU HER FOREHEAD IS HUGE!!!!!!!!
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That, or the bag should say:
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“DANGER!! THERE IS ACTUALLY A WOMAN INSIDE, EVEN THOUGH SHE LOOKS LIKE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF MARILYN MANSON AND MICHEAL JACKSON HAD SEX!!!!!!!!!!”
Baby Jane, that is not her body at all. Right above the can of Red Bull, it says that it is not her body.
K know it’s not her body. I wasn’t talking bout her body, I meant her face. The face has been over photoshopped. (and yes I know her face was pasted over another, proberly prettier girls face).
did you actually read this article? it’s sympathetic toward her situation- it talks to people who say she’s better than what she’s portraying, that she’s screwing up but the decent person is still somewhere in there. she’s a cottage industry that people feed off. it says what a few of us on here say- she’s in deep trouble, she’s screwing up but there are a hell of a lot of people egging on the downfall and reveling in it. that’s disgusting. a football pool on the day she’ll off herself? how could anyone think that’s appropriate or decent? she’s a lab rat, as they said in the article. she’s just some big experiment that went awry and now the people who put her there are coming away unscathed. she’s like the scene in “blue velvet” where the perfect suburb gives way to the bugs and dirt underneath.
You mean she’s capable of being more than a dirty, vulgar woman. Yes everyone knows that, of course she is…..but only with treatment, and only if she grows up and matures. Britney doesn’t want to do that because it means hard work and she can’t be bothered doing hard work.
Of course the people are coming out. Look at your local library and book store. How many books do you see on Elvis? What in the world makes people think that people aren’t going to spill the dirt on a lesser and more self absorbed star? And yet over and over again, you see people connected to Elvis asked about their role and again and again they say, “We didn’t know, or we couldn’t do anything about it.” What’s happening now is so predicatable. These people grew up with Elvis and they know the public is going to aks them when they knew and what they did about it. Some of it is exploitative to Britney, but much of it must be answered because the public demands the truth. Of course they are coming out to spill the horrible truth about what a horrible life she’s lived. Only the fantards didn’t see this coming years ago.
The public doesn’t demand the truth- they like to be in on people’s business. That’s why reality shows are so popular. They enjoy a show, and Britney is unfortunately giving them one. I didn’t follow her much through the years, but while she always seemed kind of silly, she always put on a hell of a show. (I started thinking trouble when she went on and on about wanting to get married and have kids because you could see she was auditioning people for the role of husband.) Like the article says, I don’t think anyone saw an implosion of this magnitude coming. Wouldn’t it be great if someone out of this kidnapped her and brought her to some great mental facility? Someone who actually had her best interests in mind? We both think she’s being stupid, but I feel sorry for her, and you don’t. I think she’s seriously mentally ill and is sabotaging herself and everyone around her and thank God her kids aren’t with her right now. I have heard she’s under the care of a psychiatrist and pray it’s true.
They do want the truth to be known. britney and her peeps have tried to set Britney on this platform as the goddess and most successful singer of all time, world wide. Obviously, she is not. People will make sure that the little lost girl hiding behind the curtain is exposed for the sham she truly is.
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Speak for yourself. Lots of people saw this coming. Did you read the article? Former maanagers and people who worked with her did see this coming, but they never did anything about it because they were getting rich. The public did see this coming but they refused to do anything because they’d rather believe that tabloid magazines are all fake. A whole world saw this coming. I doubt she’s under the care of a psychologist, Sam just wants us to think that because he wants us to want him to be around her. He doesn’t like the bad press he’s getting.
I do speak for myself. Thanks. If people want the truth to be known, it’s because of nosiness. That’s why people stop to watch arguments on the street, or shows like “Cops”. Their motives aren’t particularly lofty. No one’s motives were lofty with Britney, either. They sold her, on a platter, like in “Pretty Baby”. They sold her a bill of goods, and the public as well. They made her into something she wasn’t and now she’s getting terrible media for it. (And, obviously, she’s great at screwing up on her own.) She’s a total gold mine for everyone around her and she is too weak or self pitying (probably due to mental illness)to stand up on her own two feet and take her life into her own hands. It’s just sad.
Sam is disgusting. Adnan is disgusting. They’re controlling parasites. She’s insane and basically picking out a coffin. I feel badly for her parents and much worse for her sons, the ones she wanted so badly that she held auditions for a man to fall in love with and create what she thought she wanted. Kevin’s poverty and lack of status probably made her think she’d have the upper hand.
No it’s from nosiness alone. Britney is a product, She is trying to sell herself as something she clearly is not. People have a right to know that, they also hate being lied to. That isd the majority of the bad press right there. If she would just quit lying about her flaws, or at least quit pretending to be a religios freak (like last night she’s carrying artounf her Kabllah book again), then people would tone down the attacks by about 300%. She brings this upon herself by being a liar.
Yes, she’s a gold mine for those around her and that’s why they have covered her butt and lied for her for so long. That’s why she never had to pay the consequences for her acrtions UNTIL NOW. Had Lynne spent less time teaching Britney to be a sex pot and more time spanking that bottom when she was a toddler, the Britney we know today would have been a different person. Her parents aren’t the best people either and they have profitted off of Britney which isa why she doesn’t trust them now when they are saying they’ll help her. SXhe doesn’t understand why they lied to her and treated her like a goddess for so long, and now suddenly are telling her no. Most of us learn the word no as a toddler. Britney’s learning it now for the first time….her parents are not completly off the hook. It is Brintey’s choice to straighten up her life or drown in her sorrows, she has clearly chosen to drown, and make sure that every wave that washes over her is photographed because she wants the blame to be places on someone besides herself. Adnan and Sam are disgusting but remember she invited them into her life, and keeps them there even after they have brought her trouble, and even after she was warned that they were trouble. You hang out in the bowles of society, you are going to get shit on. Doesn’t matter if the bowels are drug users, gang members, religious zealots or papz….there is a reason why you shouldn’t hang out with the wrong crowd. The wrong crowd will always be there, no matter who they are, and we all have the resposisbilty to recognize them and stay away from them. Britney is doing the equivalent of blaming a drug pusher for a drug addiction. Sure, they aren’t off the hook, but had she ever learned the word no, and that her fame isn’t going to protect her from her bad decisions, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.
***it’s not from nosiness alone****
And anyway, a nosey person can only uncover as much as you show them. Why is it hard for you to believe that a woman who bares her vagina wants us to see everything else, too?
Jenn, I’m glad someone on here is capable of compassion, and not so hung up on genitalia that they can’t see the bigger picture. You are, by far, more intelligent then half of the “individuals” on here.
If you truly have compassion for Britney then you would recognize that her showing her vagina in the way she did was only one incidence in the big picture that Proves she needs help. If you really had compassion for her then you would want her to get help.
blah blah blah. To echo others: why do you have such a mixed relationship with your vag? Seriously, go impress a twelve year old with that rhetoric of yours. Leave the real conversation to the grown ups.
You are such a grown up that you think a woman who bares her vagina in front of a sea of papz is fit converstaion for a twleve year old. Are you a pedophile? Britney bared her vag and there ain’t nothing oyu can do to change that. Your girl is a whore and she’s mentally ill. Get over it. She needs help, not your lame excuses.
You are so obsessed with vag, troll. where does it say I am a fan? Take that grade twelve education and improve it - you clearly have much time to kill on the internet.I agree with jay and co., you really are deranged. poor thing.
You are the one who keeps mentioning darling…it’s not my fault that this girl is soooo sick that she walks aroud naked. That says so much about her, and about you that you don’t know enough about mental health to understand that this is a symptom of her sickness. I am a regular here, you are the troll. What grade are you in, 5th? No, even fifth graders have enough sense to research a topic before they declare themselves expertts enough to discount it. Say what you will darling, it doesn’t change the fact that your idol was hospitalized last night for the second time in less than a month. If she wasn’t your idol then your posts would be objective, rather than attacking those you diagree with.
Jenn is correct, the article is sympathtic towards britney, you guys should read it before bitching.
The entire article is thought provoking, but two things really stand out for me. The first is the assertion that Britney is NOT white trash. Uhm, excuse me, but she IS.
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The other is the notion that Britney actually reads, and that she’s read “The Celestine Prophecy”. I wonder if she understood it? Hmmm… probably not…
You know, I don’t think she is. I think her mental illness has spiraled out of control without medication and it’s making her choose horrendous decisions and think irrationally. It’s making her appear trashy, and I don’t think she is or she would’ve been like this always instead of this past few years.
As for her reading, the amazing Moby worked with her and once said she’s far savvier than anyone knows.
Jenn, I just wanted to take some time to tell you that your opinions are respected. I don’t agree with maybe 50-40% of your opinions, but that’s cool because you make your arguments so nice to read, that nobody wants to lash out at you. (I know I don’t always take my own advice when it comes to respectful opinions)
thank you so much for saying that. i really appreciate it- especially that you even noticed. i don’t always think that opinionated is correct, so i try to temper myself. i feel that if i want to teach my daughters- and my students- properly, i have to practice what i preach. from one mama to another…. THANKS! :)
and p.s.- i learned the hard way about being disrespectful and rude. it made me want to learn to be better about talking/writing to people. and once again, thanks for noticing. i tend to get a kick out of the humor in your posts, so maybe i’m whitewashing too much!
This article neither defends or attacks her. Actually it does both. Its not sympathetic, it throws out a million ideas and possibilities while not residing on a single one as fact. It exposes Britney Spears in a very neutral way….so neutral that the fantards can say “see they’re nice they’re saying nice things”….and the aggressors can say “they are totally chopping her down”.
Thats what Britney Spears provokes.
It’s good because it’s OBJECTIVE, as journal pieces should be.
Total trash. Horrible mother. Slut, mean wench, druggie—-you name it, that’s her. Just pitiful. Give it 6 months to a year—-Anna Nicole all over again. I hate to say it, but her kids will be better off if they never encounter her again. White trash. Those of you who think she’s something special—-well, she just plain isn’t. A caricature is what she’s become.
“…I think it helped me to have a camera there, instead of it just being me and him…”
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There you have it folks, britney in a nutshell. Kinda puts everything happening now in a new light, huh? She loves the camera more than a boyfriend or husband.
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Hehehe, and nowhere, in ANYTHING britney says, NOWHERE, in ANYTHING her friends or former management team says, NOWHERE does it say britney even remotely likes her fans. All it says is she SNUBBED HER FANS at the Crossroads premiere. HAHAHA!!!! SUCK IT FANTARDS, BRITNEY HATES YOU!!!! GO BUY TEN COPIES OF BLACKOUT, VOTE HER INTO SOME OBSCURE AWARD SHOW, AND CRY YOURSELF TO SLEEP B*TCHES!!!!! HAHAHA!!!! SUCK IT!!! SUCK IT!!!!!
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And hey fantards, did you read this:
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“…she was out the night before the VMAs doing blow and then took a Xanax to come down and then got drunk right before the show…”
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Remember when you said it was all Sarah Silverman’[s fault? Hurts, doesn’t it? BRITNEY SCREWED YOU OVER AGAIN YOU WIMPS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SUCK IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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I can tell you where it all will end folks. When a star uses her body to sell music, and then they have to use SOMEONE ELSE’S BODY to sell perfume, magazines, and make videos with, and they have to use a heavily Photoshopped image of an old picture of the former star’s face, and the star is UNWILLING to do anything but TAKE THE CHEAP AND EASY ROUTE BY SELLING HERSELF OUT TO THE UTTER SCUM AND LEECHES OF HOLLYWOOD SOCIETY, well folks, it ain’t gonna be pretty.
Sorry, Mike. I seemed to have stolen your paragraph tactics. Makes for easy reading.
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No biggie. A few people do that, use * the same way, or use the “…” quotation. It’s all good.
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Personally, my favorite is THE ALL CAPS METHOD!!! IT MAKES ME HORNY, BABY, YEAH!!!!! (Austin Powers)
Love the article. And yes, it actually says on the cover of the magazine that that is not her body.(See the lower left corner). The article spits out everything that us so-called “haters” have been saying through this whole fiasco. It is almost as if they took bits and pieces of posts that MikeG, Kelly, and myself have been posting for almost the past year. It also disprooves a lot of the fantards’ arguments. Just read it, and weep. I especially love this part:
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“Britney became the tabloids’ wet dream by making herself the very image of a bad person. More than that: the worst person. There is, it seems, no limit to the number of things you can hate her for. She’s irresponsible, lazy, selfish, arrogant, stupid, tacky, rich and so depraved as to look almost subhuman. (Paris Hilton nicknamed her “the animal.”) She does not take care of herself, and still she could have sex with almost anyone she wants. She revels in her own violation and invites you to the orgy: “I can’t control myself/They want more/Well, I’ll give ’em more … ” she sings on Blackout.”
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The thought on everyone’s mind should be that we would love to see Britney wake up one day and just be normal, or how she used to be, except…more mature. To explain and apologize for everything she has done to herself, and to everybody else. Unfortunately, Britney’s actions and words force some people into wanting to one day see the headlines say “America’s one-time sweetheart Dead”. I love that this article doesn’t sugarcoat Britney, and it forces you to get the cold-hard truth. Some good, most of it bad. Unlike the fantards, who constantly try to make excuses and cover her up.
“I love that this article doesn’t sugarcoat Britney, and it forces you to get the cold-hard truth.”
uh sweetie, this view has been around for a long time. And no doubt you and Kelly1 and MikeG are going to jump up and down and point out that you’ve been saying this all along, as if anyone with half a brain couldn’t figure this out.
Apologize to who? You? Please, as if she needs your acceptance and forgiveness. Perhaps you may want to look at yourself, why you channel so much hatred and contempt and spew it on a gossip blog. If you really were all about change and helping people, you’d find better facets to vent your viewpoints and frustration.
You and you cronies are sad human beings… and butt ugly to boot, not only in physical appearance, but in your hearts as well. So desperate to be noticed that you create personalities for yourself on a gossip blog. Hanging with Looney Spears would more entertaining, at least she has feelings. I feel so sorry for you all.
“Apologize to who? You? Please..”
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UHM, HOW ABOUT HER FUCKING KIDS, YOU INSENSITIVE PRICK!
You clearly can’t read between the lines. The words “fucking” and “kids” should never be used in the same sentence, unless you support WT parenting. And for the record, yelling and uttering profanities is not the grown up way of winning an argument, or a “debate”, as you call it. what a fantastic role model you are.
“uh sweetie, this view has been around for a long time….as if anyone with half a brain couldn’t figure this out…”
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Jim, meet Adam. Adam, Jim.
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“Please, as if she needs your acceptance and forgiveness. Perhaps you may want to look at yourself, why you channel so much hatred and contempt and spew it on a gossip blog. If you really were all about change and helping people, you’d find better facets to vent your viewpoints and frustration.”
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Hypocrite. Judging me and my life while telling me its wrong to judge anyone else’s life, who just happens to be SHOVED IN THE WORLD’S FACE EVERY SINGLE DAY. (not that you just did, but other people of your kind are doing).I swear, Britney is worse that a hypocritcal bible-pusher.
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“You and you cronies are sad human beings… and butt ugly to boot, not only in physical appearance, but in your hearts as well.”
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Carolina, girl, when did you start posting our pictures?? I can’t believe you would do that without our permission.
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“So desperate to be noticed that you create personalities for yourself on a gossip blog. Hanging with Looney Spears would more entertaining, at least she has feelings. I feel so sorry for you all.”
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That’s just fucking funny, bordering the line of pathetic. Checking out the celebrity gossip blog only to insult the commentators is beyond any of those “insults” you just posted. This could be a hobby…celebrity gossip blogs…because debating is awesome. Getting other’s views on issues…awesome. Everybody at once telling their opinions about a celebrity-a person worldly known- is not pathetic; Coming to this site to personally pick on individuals that NOBODY knows is fucking sad man!!!
Wow, Jim, looks like you hit a nerve. And Crista honey, your picture is on the myspace portion of TOB, idiot.
The honey and sweetie comments are not welcome, I am a married woman. If you think my myspace picture is ugly, you have beauty issues and I would love to see your rendition of beauty.
No problem, dearie, there’s no way I could tap that. While a tad harsh, I agree with Jim’s comment. Based on your opinions, and your treatment of others on this forum, you don’t seem like a very nice person.
Jim, Britnmey needs forgiveness for what????????? The girl has never given a truthful apology for anything, and her fans deny her faults up to the point that it can no longer be denied, and then thety sugar coat it and downplay it.
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Maybe you’ve never heard about a little thing called the twelve steps. It is not up to a person to demand forgiveness. It is up to them to admit their wrongs truthfully. And Britney refuses to do that. She’s still committing the same offenses and she’s still asking us to believe that she is queen of the world.
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Acceptance? No, what you are asking us to do is turn a blind eye. That’s called enabling. The world has accepted that BRitney has a problem and needs serious treatment. Until she accepts that she has a problem and committs herself to getting help, then tough love is all she’s going to get form the press. You don’t teach a child not to run in the street by awarding them with a candy bar each time they do. You scold them, or swat their butt, you explain to them why it’s dangerous. You don’t pat them on the back and congratulate them and say that everything’s going to be ok after they walk in front of a semi.
Your Christian tactics are of no interest to me.
And where does it say that I accept Britney? Your melodramatic attempts at intelligent debate are trivial and boring. For the record, you are enabling defamation, and permitting a cycle of rhetorical abuse so deeply rooted in the socio-economic status of this nation, that it will take generations to undo the damage. Congratulations, well done.