Britney Spears has lost relationship with sons amid post-conservatorship struggles, doc reports

The new TMZ Britney Spears documentary poses a provocative question about her life since the end of her conservatorship: Has freedom been good for her?

That question may be difficult to answer, but the documentary, “Britney Spears: The Price of Freedom,” strongly suggests that her freedom hasn’t been good for her relationship with her teenage sons, Preston, 17, and Jayden, 16. It reports that the bond has suffered over the past 18 months, to the point that the boys have not seen their mother for “well over a year,” producer Katie Hayes said.

“By the end of the summer (2022), tensions got so bad that the boys weren’t even responding to her texts. And she was furious,” Hayes claimed. Page Six confirmed that Spears last saw her children “at the very beginning of 2022,” before her June 2022 marriage to personal trainer Sam Asghari.

With their father, Kevin Federline, Preston and Jayden also are planning to move to Hawaii, Page Six also reported this week. The boys want to leave Los Angeles, in large part to escape the publicity surrounding their mother, who continues to fascinate the entertainment media with her ongoing mental health struggles and reported troubles with Asghari.

The documentary alleges that Spears, 41, lives mostly in isolation and drinks coffee and energy drinks “by the gallons” to stay awake for multiple days at a time after binge-sleeping. But the beverages also contribute to manic states, TMZ founder Harvey Levin said in the documentary. Her marriage to Asghari also is “volatile” and regularly rocked by “screaming matchings” that have forced Asghari to sometimes stay away from home, Levin said.

Asghari hit back against these assertions on Instagram Story Sunday, saying it’s “disgusting” that TMZ is once again subjecting his wife to the relentless scrutiny she faced as a young female entertainer, the Washington Post reported. 

“Now, all of a sudden, after 15 years, she’s free after all those gaslighting and all those things that went down, now you’re going to put her under a microscope and tell her story? No. That’s also disgusting,” Ashgari said in the since-deleted video.

Spears’ “freedom” came in November 2021 when a judge ordered the end of a conservatorship she had been under for 13 years. The legal arrangement was initially imposed after Spears had a series of public meltdowns in the late 2000s. The conservatorship gave her father Jamie Spears control over her finances, daily activities and medical decisions.

The documentary features experts, such as controversial celebrity doctor Drew Pinsky, opining on Spears’ known activities since November 2021, the Washington Post said. Pinksy asserts that Spears has been “screaming for help” with her behavior, some of which is apparent in her frequent social-media posts.

Spears’ sons also have expressed concern about their mother’s post-conservatorship social media posts, especially when she started to dominate headlines by posting nude photos of herself online.

The boys decided to not attend her wedding to Asghari last year, with Federline telling the Daily Mail in August 2022: “The boys have decided they are not seeing her right now. It’s been a few months since they’ve seen her. They made the decision not to go to her wedding.”

Federline, who was married to Spears from 2004 to 2006, told the Daily Mail he tried to help their sons understand their mother’s behavior, Page Six reported. He said their relationship with Spears stabilized after the conservatorship began, but it began to deteriorate after it ended, due to unspecified things he said the teens witnessed during their visits with her.

As for the nude selfies, Federline said: “I try to explain to them, ‘Look, maybe that’s just another way she tries to express herself. But that doesn’t take away from the fact of what it does to them. It’s tough. I can’t imagine how it feels to be a teenager having to go to high school.”

Spears wasn’t happy about Federline’s Daily Mail interview, which included comments by Jayden about the “emotional trauma” that he and his brother had endured because of their mother’s troubles, Page Six reported. In a September 2022 Instagram post, Spears said she was saddened to read that she hadn’t lived “up to his expectations of a mother.”

“Maybe one day we can meet face to face and talk about this openly !!!!” Spears said.

The TMZ documentary left opened the possibility that Spears and her sons might be able to re-connect, Page Six reported.

“Recently, there have been occasional texts between Britney and her kids, so maybe the ice is thawing a bit,” Charles Latibeaudiere, a TMZ executive producer, said. In an interview for the documentary, Federline’s attorney, Mark Vincent Kaplan, agreed that there is hope for the estranged family members, who still have a lot of “love” for one another.

“(Preston and Jayden) love their mother, and they hope that the relationship will improve going forward so that everyone is comfortable, but right now, that is a dynamic that doesn’t seem to be in existence,” Kaplan said.