Britney Spears will not sit for his father’s so-called “revenge deposition,” a Los Angeles County judge ruled Wednesday.
Judge Brenda Penny stuck to her tentative order at an afternoon hearing and pardoned the “Toxic” singer after Britney’s attorney, Mathew Rosengart, argued that an in-person questioning by jamie spearsThe lawyers would leave their client “re-traumatized”.
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In his court ruling, the judge said the pop star “likely lacks” any relevant knowledge about his father’s disputed conduct, including his alleged espionage scheme first. reported by a whistleblower in the The New York Times. He said Jamie’s attorneys have “alternative” ways to get the answers they seek without placing an “unwarranted burden” on the superstar.
“For example, the issue of surveillance is within the scope of the pending petition challenging payments related to unauthorized surveillance, yet Mr. Spears is likely to receive the same and possibly more responses through other means. of discovery,” Judge Penny said. .
Jamie sought to testify to his daughter about what he calls “unsubstantiated claims” made against him as he seeks court approval for his handling of her finances since 2019 and permission to bill her estate for legal fees. in progress. Britney is fighting those approvals, claiming that her father bullied her and mismanaged her estate while she allegedly worked with a security company to monitor her private communications and bug her bedroom.
At a hearing two weeks ago, Rosengart said Jamie was essentially looking for a “revenge deposition” amid the ongoing legal war. She argued that her client has no first-hand knowledge of her father’s alleged misdeeds because she was kept in the dark during her conservatorship of almost 14 years that ended last November.
“Whether (Jamie Spears) believes it or not, her daughter is traumatized by what happened at her hands for over a decade,” Rosengart argued Wednesday. “He is free to believe that his flesh and his blood are lying. She is not, but he is free to believe that. What would a decent human being do in those circumstances? What would a decent father do? He would say, ‘That’s what my daughter believes. I love my daughter.’ He has told the world that he loves his daughter. If that is true, he must not only accept the court’s ruling, but he must withdraw the motion from him (for additional fees). It’s what a decent man would do.
In a subsequent ruling Wednesday, Judge Penny denied Jamie’s motion to obtain discovery from Kroll Associates, the investigative firm that determined Jamie paid himself more than $6.3 million from his daughter’s estate between 2008 and the end of 2020. .
Jamie’s attorney, Alex Weingarten, argued against the court’s rulings, saying he was “stunned” by the proposal that Jamie has no right to have his daughter or his investigative firm prove it amid his effort to be “claimed”. He later defended Jamie’s record, saying guardianship is the reason Britney “is where she is today.”
“Mr. Spears is proud, and will continue to be proud, of what he did for, not stop, what he did for his daughter, protecting her from svengalis and Rasputins and other unscrupulous people who sought to earn her fame. He protected her wonderfully for 13 years,” Weingarten told the court. “He did nothing wrong.”
Judge Penny listened quietly, stuck to her rulings, and then moved on, moving on to Rosengart’s still-pending motions to depose. tri star executives Robin Greenhill and Lou Taylor, the managers hired by Jamie to oversee Britney’s professional endeavors during her conservatorship. The judge said she found Rosengart’s subpoenas seeking Tri Star documents related to Jamie’s alleged spying to be fair game, but the hearing ran out of time amid a rebuttal argument from one of Tri’s attorneys. Star. The court set a date of August 24 for a follow-up hearing on that matter.
Greenhill and Taylor have been fighting citations for almost a year. According to Rosengart, Taylor was working in unison with Jamie in 2008 when Britney’s controversial conservatorship first took off. The lawyer claims that Tri Star unjustly enriched himself with money from Britney’s estate, earning more than $18 million in an alleged love settlement. And he claims that the evidence shows that Greenhill participated in the surveillance of Britney’s private communications.
Rosengart zeroed in on Greenhill after she was pointed out in the blockbuster statements made by former Spears security staffer Alex Vlasov at the New York Times documentary film Controlling Britney Spears.
According to Vlasov, Greenhill actually proposed the plan to “mirror” Britney’s iCloud account to monitor her text messages, notes, call logs, browsing history and photos. He said that Jamie Spears and Greenhill were in a group conversation with her boss, Edan Yemini, head of the security company Black Box, tracking Britney’s personal life.
“Edan would bring me text messages that Britney would have, and ask me to encrypt them and give them to him so he could pass them on to Robin and Jamie,” Vlasov said. “They would also monitor conversations with her friends, with her mother, with her attorney Sam Ingham.”
Vlasov claimed that at one point, Yemini “had an audio recording device placed in Britney’s bedroom.”
In a Nov. 4 affidavit accompanying his motion to vacate the subpoenas, Greenhill stated that “no one at Tri Star has ever suggested monitoring Ms. Spears’ electronic communications.” He also denied any knowledge of a “concealed electronic surveillance device placed in Ms. Spears’ bedroom.” She and Taylor suggested that Rosengart’s request for records dating back 14 years was “grossly exaggerated” because Tri Star was not involved in Britney’s career or the creation of the conservatorship in early February 2008.
“Tri Star played no role in suggesting the establishment of conservatorship,” Greenhill wrote.
According to Rosengart and his associate attorney Kyle Freeny, Greenhill’s statements were false. In a July 1 affidavit, Freeny told the court that Black Box had produced Word documents containing screenshots of Britney’s text messages and that Yemini had shared the texts with Jamie and Greenhill via email between them. 2016 and 2019.
The attorneys also provided the court with a January 1, 2008 email that Jamie’s attorney, Geraldine Wyle, sent to Taylor discussing the best time to file for guardianship.
“Lou, we have run into a problem with the selection of our judge: the only judge who will be able to hear our case on Friday is Mr. [judge] who will not give Jamie the power to administer psychotropic drugs to B. The first time he leaves the bank is on Wednesday. That is the first safe day to be in court on this matter,” Wyle wrote in the email a month before Britney’s conservatorship was granted. “If we go earlier, all this work might as well be practically nothing.”
In a subsequent email to Jamie Spears on January 17, 2008, Taylor wrote that she had already spoken to other people about Andrew Wallet, the man who eventually became Jamie’s co-conservator. “He and tri star will serve as co-conservators,” Taylor wrote, meaning his company would join Wallet as another co-conservator. That never happened.
“Tri Star’s own internal emails, obtained from a third party, demonstrate that Tri Star’s Lou Taylor played a significant role in Ms. Spears’s affairs prior to and during the early days of the conservatorship,” Rosengart told the court in a July 1 presentation. .
Attorneys for Tri Star and Greenhill countered that Taylor’s emails, as well as the alleged Black Box documents, had not been authenticated and amounted to hearsay.
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