Britney Spears says she was scared her family was going to kill her while she was under her legal conservatorship

• In her new book, Britney Spears writes that she worried her family wanted to kill her.
• In multiple chapters of the book, Spears explains she was paranoid because of their control over her.

In her memoir "The Woman In Me," Britney Spears reveals just how deeply she feared her family while she was under a legal conservatorship for 13 years.

Spears writes multiple times that she was scared her family members wanted to kill her. (Representatives for both Spears' parents and both her siblings did not reply to Insider's requests for comment).

She says her fears began in early 2008 before the conservatorship was put in place, after she locked herself in a bathroom with her youngest son Jayden James Federline amid a custody disagreement with his father, her ex-husband Kevin Federline.

According to Spears, the disagreement ended with a SWAT team breaking through her bathroom door, taking her son from her, and tying her to a gurney to transport her to the hospital.

"The only thing I was guilty of was feeling desperate to keep my own children for a few more hours and to get some assurance that I wasn't going to lose them for good," she writes in the book.

Spears was placed on her first 5150 hold after that incident — a 72-hour involuntary mental health hospitalization. The singer writes that she tried to cooperate with her family the best she could so that she could see her sons. But the conditions of their control only got worse when in 2008, she was put under the conservatorship, which was initially meant to be temporary.

The legal arrangement gave her father Jamie control over personal decisions about her health, who she associated with, and her career. A lawyer was put in charge of her personal finances and she was told how she was allowed to spend money.

Spears has previously called her circumstances "abusive," and writes in her memoir that her father would sometimes take away her private cell phone.

"I would be smuggled a private phone and try to break free. But they always caught me," the singer writes. "And here's the sad, honest truth: after everything I had been through, I didn't have a lot of fight left in me. I was tired, and I was scared, too. After being held down on a gurney, I knew they could restrain my body any time they wanted to. They could've tried to kill me, I thought. I started to wonder if they did want to kill me."

Spears writes that she thought if she complied by the rules set up for her, her family would eventually end the arrangement and give her access to her sons again. But the conservatorship was still in place when Spears says her father pressured her to go to a rehab facility in Beverly Hills. She says he threatened to take legal action against her and said he'd make her look bad in court if she didn't abide.

"They kept me locked up against my will for months," Spears writes.

She says she tried to contact her sister Jamie Lynn to help her leave the facility, but the "Zoey 101" actor was no ally — Spears says she texted back, "Stop fighting it."

"This will sound crazy but I'll say it again because it's the truth: I thought they were going to try to kill me," she recalls in the book.

When Spears returned home from one of her trips to rehab, she describes feeling like "a shell of myself," because lithium made her lose sense of time. Her family came for a visit, which frightened the singer.

"It crossed my mind that they were only visiting to finish off what they'd started a few months earlier, to kill me for real. If that sounds paranoid, consider all the things I'd been through up until this point—the ways in which they had deceived and institutionalized me," she writes. She says she was kind to them so they wouldn't "try to kill me again."

Spears' conservatorship was ended by Judge Brenda Penny in November 2021.