Music Discussion and Information

IT WAS WHILE RECORDING BLACKOUT that Britney Spears began to report she was being stalked by a “crazy lady” who had been FedExing her strange gifts, photos of herself with butterflies and letters in which she advised the superstar, using a creepily maternal tone, that she was “possessed” and needed to exorcise her “demon spirits.” As Spears wrote in an email to her then-lawyer Gary Stiffelman, “We told her a million times to leave me alone and now she is saying she is going to visit my drunk fucking father in Kentwood [Louisiana].”

The crazy lady was Lou Taylor, who specialized in a certain kind of pseudo-faith-based celebrity crisis management. Unbeknownst to Spears, Taylor had been working behind the scenes for at least four years to insinuate herself into the family business: managing little sister Jamie Lynn’s budding career as the star of the popular Nickelodeon show Zoey 101, “praying and fasting” with their estranged father Jamie, hiring a ghostwriter for the memoir Lynne Spears announced she was writing shortly after Jamie Lynn became pregnant at age 16 with the child of a boy she’d met at a church camp, even loaning Jamie Spears $40,000 shortly before his daughter was involuntarily hospitalized. Taylor exchanged emails with Jamie Spears’s lawyers, brainstorming about who would manage the conservatorship, even agreeing to postpone the request until a particular judge who was known to frown upon giving conservators the power to administer psychotropic drugs to their charges went on vacation.

#FreeBritney activists have spent years researching Taylor’s role in the conservatorship, attempting to assess her actions and quantify how much she extracted from the Britney Spears brand, a figure that has ranged from $18 million to $600 million. Taylor, for her part, told The New York Times that she “did nothing wrong” in the Spears case; the Prospect sought comment from her but did not receive a response.

But the most alarming thing about Taylor and the rest of “Team Con,” which is short for conservatorship in the #FreeBritney world, is the way their careers link some of the tawdriest episodes of institutionalized abuse to the uppermost echelons of corporate America. Just two years after Britney was conserved, Lindsay Lohan’s parents told X17 Online that Taylor had approached them to manage a conservatorship for the former child actress. Around the same time, Kurt Cobain’s widow Courtney Love revealed in social media posts that Taylor had attempted to impose a “muted strain of a conservatorship” on her as part of an elaborate plot—masterminded, Love claimed, by Azoff and Lester Knispel—to secure control over Cobain’s publishing rights, which she held.