Is Britney Spears under surveillance? Ex manager says singer 'borrows phones from strangers'
Britney Spears' former manager, Sam Lutfi, on Sunday, July 4, claimed that the singer has had to borrow phones from strangers in order to contact him, suggesting that the singer is being watched closely during her conservatorship.
Spears was recently in the news after she appeared in court and gave testimony regarding her controversial conservatorship for the first time on Wednesday, June 23. The 'Toxic' singer has long wanted to remove her father as her conservator since 2016. In 2019, she announced a temporary hiatus from her career until she freed herself of James Spears' conservatorship.
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It was also reported on Sunday that Spears' father allegedly "taunted her as fat, a w***e, and a terrible mother" immediately after her conservatorship began, according to a friend. The Princess of Pop has claimed several times that she is a victim of 'abuse' as a result of her father's apparent control over her life.
Is Britney Spears under surveillance?
Lutfi told The New Yorker on Saturday that she had called him from the phones of strangers from time to time in the past. "I'll go years without contact, and then I'll get a call every once in a while from her in a closet," he told the publication's Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino, reported the Daily Mail.
Lutfi believes she has a phone that her attorneys have mirrored and that she only calls or messages when she can obtain another phone. "Last time she called me, she was at Ralphs, in Calabasas," Lutfi said. "After she hung up, I got a call from the same number - it's an Asian doctor, who says, 'Wow, this is surreal, Britney just borrowed my phone.' Five years ago, she borrowed a phone at the gym and just made off with it," he said.
Lutfi claimed the last time he saw Spears was in 2015, and that the interaction worried him. “My opinion is that this conservatorship has drastically affected her mind-set,” he said. A friend of Spears concurred, saying: “They made her a zombie. That is not the same girl.”
Spears "always believed there were massive consequences if she didn't work," according to Lutfi, who is under a five-year restraining order from an attorney working on the conservatorship, and that "it blew her mind that she could just call the shots." Spears' mother, Lynne, alleges in her biography that Lutfi told her that he had damaged Spears' automobiles, cut her phone connections, and crushed her pills and delivered them to her in her meals.
Jon Eardley, who tried to move Spears' case to federal court, said Spears' phone was taken away from her the last time she tried to call him, and the number was terminated the next day. In January 2009, Christina Lutfi, Sam Lufti's sister, sneaked in a prepaid cellphone to Spears, but it was confiscated when a housekeeper heard her talk over the phone and told her father. “They ended up finding it,” Christina Lutfi told the New Yorker. “Looking back, I’m, like, this is effed up. I’d been to her house. She was super sweet. She was clearly functional enough to work out and put out an album. Why couldn’t she have a phone? I didn’t understand it.”
Lutfi was kicked out of Spears' circle when the phone was discovered, the news outlet reports. James, she suspects, uncovered evidence of her involvement in the scheme. “Anytime someone could threaten the conservatorship,” she said, “they were out.”