Britney Spears may be free from her 13-year conservatorship, but she and her legal team are still focused on making sure that the people who kept it going for so long will pay for it.
The singer’s legal team says that Tri Star Sports and Entertainment, her former business manager, was instrumental in and profited off of the conservatorship. New court documents point toward a series of emails between Tri Star founder Lou Taylor and Spears’s father, Jamie, indicating that the company strategized about creating the conservatorship and received at least $18 million from it. The claims refute the testimonies from Robin Greenhill, Spears’s Tri Star business manager, that the company had played no role.
“Contrary to Tri Star’s public position and Ms. Greenhill’s November 4, 2021 sworn Declaration in which she stated that ‘in early 2008, Tri Star had no role in Ms. Spears’ affairs,’ Tri Star’s own internal emails (obtained from a third-party) demonstrate that Tri Star’s Lou Taylor played a substantial role in Ms. Spears’s affairs prior to and in the early days of the conservatorship, ‘in early 2008,'” Spears’s lawyer Mathew Rosengart writes in the filing.
In a January 2008 email from Taylor to Jamie, just two weeks before Jamie applied for the conservatorship, Lou explicitly refers to Tri Star serving as a co-conservator. “I talked to the girls about andrew Wallet, he and tri star will serve as co’s w you,” Taylor wrote, referring to Wallet, who did serve as co-conservator for the majority of the 13 years.
The emails also indicate Taylor’s push to replace Bryan Spears, Britney’s brother, as the trustee of Britney’s trust. “I have fought for Jamie for 3 years, prayed and fasted with him every week and life has changed drastically because of this determination. I am asking that you do that now … I am the right person for this,” Taylor wrote in one email.
Perhaps most concerning of all, though, is just how entwined Taylor and Jamie’s business partnership was: the new documents indicate that at the time Spears owed Tri Star $40,000 for a loan that he was given, a fact that was hidden from the court.
“Tri Star, Lou Taylor and Robin Greenhill have all denied that Tri Star was involved in the creation of the Conservatorship, no doubt aware that such involvement — shortly after it extended the generous loan to Mr. Spears — would call into question not just the exorbitant fees paid to Tri Star over the years,” the filing reads, “but also the motives for placing Ms. Spears into a 13-year conservatorship in the first place.”
In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, a Tri Star rep has denied the new claims. “Tri Star was not even the business manager for the conservatorship when it was established,” the statement reads. “Cherry-picked excerpts from emails cannot change the facts, which is why this nonsense will all end once and for all when records are unsealed.”
