Twitter and the news media are fascinated by the tale of Britney Spears, the former pop star celebrity who set the dance floor on fire in the 1990s with a string of sugary pop hits that sold records like hotcakes. Heck, even Meghan McCain took to The View to demand that others Free Britney.
Issues such as this one are often dismissed or trivialized, but the story of Britney Spears has opened the world up to the complex reality of conservatorships in America, and the fact that people with disabilities have faced conservatorships for years—sometimes at their own peril. They often lack any consistent means by which to prove that they should not be in conservatorship because their access to make decisions that could refute those claims can also be stripped away from them. The story of Britney Spears is harrowing, and it deserves attention. What troubles some isn’t that she needs justice, it is that there is both a complete surprise that this has happened, and a general opinion by some as though this has never happened before. In fantastic news, some sources have begun to realize and discuss this issue.
Conservatorships were originally intended as a step courts avoided taking. There are other ways for people to be represented, after all. Many elderly assign power of attorney documents to children. Some persons with disabilities also sign a power of attorney with a family member. All of those documents have limits and still provide some agency to the person who signed the documents in question. A conservatorship? It can be a completely different story. While the internet fumes over Britney Spears, there seems to be a huge blind spot about the fact people with disabilities have lived in fear of a conservatorship for a very, very long time.
This post, taken from TikTok, really explains the issue in a way that hammers home the problem for disabled Americans.
It is rare that I see something online explained so effectively the way I feel about it. They utter these claims as though this is new, as if this as a strategy used to take away the civil rights of disabled Americans wasn’t already an ongoing problem.
The ACLU explains it here:
Fighting against the unnecessary and dangerous removal of disabled peoples’ civil rights and civil liberties is a core belief of the ACLU’s disability rights work. This is not to say that all conservatorships are bad or wrong or unnecessary — conservatorships are complex and individual processes. But the ease with which disabled people can be stripped of their rights, and the extraordinary difficulties they face getting those rights back, is a systemic disability rights issue about which we have serious concerns. [...]
To lift a conservatorship, the laws are different state by state, but a conservatee can go to the court to say they want this changed or lifted, and the court should consider it. However, it’s very difficult. Judges are very reluctant to lift conservatorships, and only the judge has the power to do so. You aren’t necessarily entitled to a lawyer to help you get out of a conservatorship either. And in many cases, it is virtually impossible for a person to access the courts, especially if their conservator doesn’t agree that the conservatorship should be lifted. How would the person — who cannot choose where they live or where they go or who they associate with — figure out how to get before a judge to challenge that they cannot make these decisions? It can be a Catch-22. As a general matter, it’s much easier to get into conservatorships than to get out of them.
Netflix recently put forward the film I Care a Lot which had some problems, yes, but in some ways depicted the way I personally have felt the problems exist within conservatorships. (Note: language in the trailer)
How can the situation play out? David Crow for Den of Geek asked that question:
Can something this scandalous and awful actually happen in America? The short answer is yes.
“These stories were horrifying and not uncommon,” Blakeson told The Moveable Fest last September. “So I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole in reading about these various stories happening in various places and thought there was something almost Kafkaesque about somebody knocking on your door and just taking you away for a reason you didn’t think was valid.”
Guardianships of course play a pivotal role in modern society. As a legal responsibility created to protect those deemed vulnerable due to a diminished capacity that’s left them “incapacitated” or “incompetent,” guardianship is usually taken up by family members or professionals (mostly lawyers) who agree to manage a vulnerable party’s assets, caring for their estate and possibly their day-to-day person and body. This means a guardian is in charge of their wards’ assets and finances, what doctors they see, what medications they take, where they live, and potentially who they interact with and how they lead their daily lives. One woman in this situation told The New York Times, “It’s worse than incarceration. At least in prison you have rights.”
There are of course great conservators who do fantastic work on behalf of clients, and family members who care for others. The New Yorker tells the story of April Parks:
Parks told the Norths that she had an order from the Clark County Family Court to “remove” them from their home. She would be taking them to an assisted-living facility. “Go and gather your things,” she said.
Rennie began crying. “This is my home,” she said.
One of Parks’s colleagues said that if the Norths didn’t comply he would call the police. Rudy remembers thinking, You’re going to put my wife and me in jail for this? But he felt too confused to argue.
Parks drove a Pontiac G-6 convertible with a license plate that read “crtgrdn,” for “court guardian.” In the past twelve years, she had been a guardian for some four hundred wards of the court. Owing to age or disability, they had been deemed incompetent, a legal term that describes those who are unable to make reasoned choices about their lives or their property. As their guardian, Parks had the authority to manage their assets, and to choose where they lived, whom they associated with, and what medical treatment they received. They lost nearly all their civil rights.
Their oldest daughter was taken aback to the point where she thought her parents had been abducted. This is the situation that people with disabilities and the elderly can face. They can be preyed upon by those who wish to do them harm and use the court system against them. The current system of conservatorships is a mess that has incredible differences state to state. One thing that is true in almost every state, however, is that it can be exceptionally difficult to get out of a conservatorship, as those who lobby to Free Britney are finding out.
Reform of conservatorships in America is needed, providing better access to independent reviews and working on behalf in a way that gives disabled and elderly Americans more opportunity to have some say in their lives if able. This is where Republicans’ drowning of the government has caused problems we are going to have a hard time solving—the funds needed to provide for an adequate court and social system to support this are not available, and Republicans in the Senate are unlikely to get behind it considering they have rejected the idea of community-based services and elderly care as infrastructure.
If you feel it and you think Britney Spears is getting a bad deal, you will get no pushback from me to tweet #FreeBritney to support her efforts to at minimum get another guardian. Recognize though that this isn’t about Britney Spears. It is a situation that people with disabilities, and especially those with any level of mental disabilities face every single day.
Friday, Jun 25, 2021 · 3:11:16 PM +00:00
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Christopher Reeves
Update: I want to provide an update to this story and a bit of understanding before the comments. I have changed the title to reflect some feedback. However, I want to explain that title. Over the past twenty years, Republicans have worked diligently to cut back resources to the services that help those with disabilities as well as elder care. The problems with conservatorships are real, and need examination. Britney’s situation certainly reflects that. However, Republicans and conservatives jumping on this bandwagon now is repulsive and, in my humble opinion, gaslights the disabled community about the longterm experience we’ve had for decades. It acts as though these bad actors were not responsible for the situation and they can wash their hands of it with a simple hashtag and move on. I think that is the blind spot I find repellent, and I could not find a better terminology at the time to express that viewpoint than to say: look, this is being completely re-written like these people responsible for making the situation worse are just now discovering it exists. That is garbage. I hope this helps those who read through this diary!