Fame is a bitchConnie Veneracion
I swore I would never write about Britney Spears. But after news broke out late last week that she had been confined at a psychiatric ward and that her father, Jamie, and lawyer Andrew Wallete had been named conservators of her estate, the Britney saga suddenly entered a new dimension. Gee, you won’t believe the crap that’s been published in the international media.
Conservatorship? When a person is incapable of taking care of himself and his personal affairs, a family member may apply to the proper court to be appointed as conservator. In some instances, the conservator is an organization rather than a single individual. In its broadest context, it means a guardian. In practice, “guardian†is used when the subject is a person; conservator is the common term when the subject is an estate. “Estate†means the total financial affairs that include cash, real and personal property. In Britney’s case, it’s both a guardianship and a conservatorship and the estate is an estimated total of $125 million.
But long before this conservatorship thing came up, Britney’s life, and the way it had been documented, had been a multi-faceted ethical drama. She had a mother accused of whoring her daughters to the entertainment industry and turning her into a personal milking cow (a goose that lays golden eggs would be more apt), a father said to have not given a hoot until Britney became a multi-millionairess, a husband whose only real claim to fame was being the father of her children, a manager, Sam Lufti, who had long been suspected of fleecing his client and feeding her drug habits.
After months of what had been referred to as self-destructive behavior, and after losing custody over her two young sons, Britney’s mother caused her confinement for psychiatric evaluation. She was suspected to be suffering from bipolar disorder; initial assessments said the drug cocktails she had been consuming for the past months only made her condition worse.
All of this, we do not know as facts. Still, many people would swear to these as the truth because that is what they have been reading on newspapers and seeing in the evening news almost every day for the past year.
If we put together everything that media has dished out to us, it’s just one long tale of exploitation. We are pushed to draw the inevitable conclusion that now that the goose is no longer capable of laying golden eggs and the eggs that have in fact been laid are now up for grabs. Lufti insists that Britney is not incapacitated (unless she were in control of her money, Lufti is left out in the cold) but her parents think otherwise. The only thing that has still not happened is ex-husband Kevin Federline asking the court to be appointed co-conservator in order to protect the interests of his and Britney’s two sons.
So easy to point fingers but so hard to prove, as Chin Wong has said in the past (in a non-Britney related conversation). Very few media writers have raised the alternative scenario—that Britney’s parents, imperfect human beings they may be, truly have their daughter’s best interests at heart. I know. That seems so far fetched. But then, it may only be far fetched because our minds have been thoroughly primed by the rumor-mongering media.
The truth is that it is in the best interest of media to keep the scandal angle afloat and alive. See, the only parties that are still making money out of all this, over and above profits that have already been earned, are the newspapers, the magazines and the entertainment shows. It’s scandalous how media—and the paparazzi are an integral arm of media, whatever the denials—are exploiting the personal tragedy of one person in order to sell garbage they pass off as news. While the paparazzi are independent operators for the most part, they wouldn’t be there if the newspapers and the magazines do not buy they photos.
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