Britney Spears Describes What It Was Like Living Under Conservatorship: I Became a ‘Child-Robot’ (Exclusive)

Britney Spears breaks her silence about how her conservation experience has affected her.

In this week’s issue, PEOPLE has an exclusive excerpt from the pop icon’s new memoir, The woman in me. In the book, Spears talks about living under a court-ordered conservatorship, which in 2008 gave her father Jamie and a lawyer control over Spears’ financial and personal affairs.

“I became a robot. But not just a robot – a kind of robot child. I was so infantilized that I was losing parts of what made me feel like myself,” Spears, 41, writes in the book. “Conservatory deprived me of my femininity, made me a child. On stage I became more of an entity than a person. I have always felt music in my bones and in my blood; they stole that from me.”

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Under conservatorship, Spears felt “like a shadow of herself,” she writes.

“That’s what’s hard to explain, how quickly I could fluctuate between being a girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way my freedom was taken away. There was no way for me to act like an adult, because I wouldn’t be treated like an adult, so I would regress and act like a girl; but then my grown-up self would retreat — only my world wouldn’t let me be an adult,” Spears writes.

He adds in the book: “The woman in me was suppressed for a long time. They wanted me to be wild on stage, the way they told me, and to be a robot the rest of the time. I felt as if I had been deprived of those good secrets of life – those cardinal supposed sins of indulgence and adventure that make us human. They wanted to take away that uniqueness and keep everything as much as possible by heart. It was the death of my creativity as an artist.”

Britney Spears on the cover of PEOPLE.

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In June 2021, after more than 13 years in custody, Spears offered impassioned testimony in open court, accusing her father and others of exploitation and abuse and begging a judge to end the custody. In September, her father was suspended as conservator, and in November his conservatorship ended.

Since finishing conservatorship, Spears has been getting her voice back and putting her life back together. In a new email interview with PEOPLE, Spears opens up about her newfound freedom.

“For the past 15 years or even at the beginning of my career, I sat while people talked about me and told my story for me. “After I got out of conservatorship, I was finally free to tell my story without repercussions from the people who were in charge of my life,” says Spears. “It is finally time for me to raise my voice and speak. And my fans deserve to hear it directly from me. No more conspiracy, no more lies – only I own my past, present and future.”

The woman in me is Britney Spears.

The woman in me is available for pre-order ahead of its October 24th release.

For more exclusive excerpts and interviews with Britney Spears, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere Friday.

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Source: HIS Education