Jamie Lynn Spears has said for years that her only interest related to Britney Spears’ conservatorship was that she loves and has always tried to protect her sister.
Now, she says she has proof.
During the second installment of the actress’ interview with Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast, she read a series of texts that also appear in her memoir, Things I Should Have Said—in which Jamie Lynn advised her sister that she didn’t trust her now-former lawyer, Samuel Ingham III.
ADVERTISEMENT
While Part One of Jamie Lynn’s interview focused on her upbringing and early relationship with Britney, Thursday’s follow-up digs into the conservatorship that ruled the singer’s life until recently.
When asked how she found out about the conservatorship, Jamie Lynn emphasized, “I knew what y’all knew.” Months earlier, as detailed in Part One, Spears had clashed with her parents and team amid her pregnancy. After that, she said, “I wasn’t really having them in my life”—so she was out of the loop in the early days of the conservatorship.
When Cooper asked how Spears patriarch James (AKA “Jamie”) could be seen as fit to serve as a conservator over his daughter despite Jamie Lynn’s description of his struggles as a parent, the actress replied, “I don’t know, you’d have to ask the fricking state of California.”
“I do think that obviously someone found a need for something,” she added, “but who am I to say? That's obviously a legal thing that had to go through a lot of approval.”
Most of the interview hinged on Britney fans’ insistence that Jamie Lynn never did enough to help her sister—either by speaking out or working to help end it entirely. Jamie Lynn denied ever being part of the conservatorship, clarifying that instead she’d at one point considered overseeing an unrelated trust for her sister’s sons—which she declined once she realized it would force her to be tied to the conservatorship itself.
“I never had one part in anything, ever, in Britney’s conservatorship or her life at all revolving around the conservatorship,” she said.
Jamie Lynn claimed that she tried to help Spears on multiple occasions, connecting her with various people and resources she thought could help. She said she spoke with Britney’s lawyer on the phone once after she and Britney shared a heart-to-heart in Hawaii—only to find out soon after that he’d shared everything she’d told him with the team representing the conservatorship itself.
“She was expressing things to me, which obviously are her things to express,” Jamie Lynn said. “But to my point of view, it felt like things—she deserved the right to talk to somebody. So I spoke with her lawyer and I told him a lot of shit, and it went nowhere and then people got mad at me.”
“Everybody turned against me,” she said. “... Because I guess, maybe, that lawyer wasn’t gonna get a paycheck if he didn’t have a job—so why did he need me fucking infringing on his rights? Right?”
On multiple occasions, Jamie Lynn said, she also suggested that her sister come live with her in Louisiana for six months—a residency switch that, to her knowledge, would have offered a loophole to dissolve the conservatorship entirely. “I don’t know why that option was not something that she wanted to follow through with,” she told Cooper.
“Any time she told me she wanted help, I gave her the chances and the opportunities and the people to help her,” Jamie Lynn added later. “She knows all of that. Why wouldn’t she just have clarified that and stopped all of this? That’s where I don’t understand, but I do know that these are factually true statements... I have to at some point speak for myself or what? Spend the rest of my life being bullied and there’s absolutely no truth to some of these things? I have to speak up for myself.”
Jamie Lynn also read text messages between herself and Britney, including a lengthy message in which she warned her sister about Samuel Ingham III. She said she also sent the message twice to Britney’s boyfriend, presumably Sam Asghari, to ensure she actually saw it. (“She would block me on and off for different reasons. I don’t really know sometimes.”)
Britney never responded to the message, Jamie Lynn said—the next time she heard from her was allegedly on December 8, a text thanking her for a birthday present she’d sent.
Cooper noted in the episode that the latter half of her interview with Spears is a follow-up phone interview that took place on January 18, after the back-and-forth between Britney and Jamie Lynn had intensified—as had fan backlash against the younger Spears.
In a recent Instagram post, Britney seemed to respond to Part One of Jamie Lynn’s interview—specifically, her tearful statement that she wished her own experiences had been treated like they mattered as much as her sister’s.
“In life a lot of people say “DO I MATTER ????” Britney wrote. “… try eating alone for 4 months morning ☀️ … noon 🕛 … and night 🌙 Jamie Lynn. I asked myself every day “DOES ANYBODY CARE ??? WTF ??? DO I MATTER ???””
“I would honestly be very interested to see your pretty face in the setting I was forced to be in and asking yourself “DO I MATTER ???” Britney continued. “I didn’t get to cry 😢 … I had to be strong … TOO STRONG 💪🏼 !!! So yes … YOU DO MATTER and don’t you ever think for one fucking second you don’t.”
Toward the end of the interview, Jamie Lynn decried fans and the media for egging on an “embarrassing” public feud. “I love my sister,” she said. “I’m always gonna love my sister. But anyone who’s encouraging this kind of thing and encouraging this behavior you are just as guilty as anyone who’s been abusive or anything else of the comments they like to say. What are you doing? All I wanna do is love and support my sister and end this nonsense. This is ridiculous. Like, the world, just grow up.”