- Britney Spears' father Jamie Spears will sit for questioning by mid-August.
- Her legal team will ask him about allegations that he spied on his daughter and profited off her.
After a Los Angeles Judge ruled in July that Britney's Spears' father Jamie Spears would have to sit for questioning by mid-august, his lawyer Alex Weingarten likened the development to a brutal, germanic execution.
"Why don't we just skip to the part of the case where we construct the gallows and hang Jamie in the public square?" Weingarten told the court, repeatedly calling the deposition request an "ambush" and demanding that Britney Spears also be deposed.
The reality – albeit less dramatic – is that Jamie Spears will have to sit for a deposition which his team had evaded since at least October, to face questions around allegations that he recorded Britney Spears in her home for over 180 hours and made profits of over $6 million from his daughter's career.
His deposition will be the latest in the ongoing case of Britney Spears's 13-year-long conservatorship. Although the conservatorship ended last year, the ugly courtroom battles over financial details and Jamie's oversight of the conservatorship have persisted. Lawyers for the father and famous daughter are still fighting to resolve issues such as whether Britney Spears owes attorney fees.
Now at the heart of the ongoing case are critical testimonies surrounding Britney Spears's surveillance, which attorneys are now battling for a judge to hear – and which could be used to build civil or criminal cases against Jamie Spears.
"Black Box Security, at the direction of Jamie Spears, placed a listening device in Britney Spears' bedroom," Rosengart told the court during a January hearing, referencing a story broken by The New York Times quoting a whistleblower from the company.
In January, Britney Spears' legal team also submitted the sworn declaration of former FBI agent Sherine Ebadi, a lead investigator in Robert Mueller's case against former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, who know works at security firm Kroll Inc. and who corroborated the claims made by the Black Box whistleblower.
Trusts & estates attorney Ashwani Prabhakar told Insider that the most effective way forward for Britney Spears would be to first secure a deposition from the security firms with knowledge of the surveillance operation – and then to take on Jamie next.
Questioning Jamie Spears first could offer a limited picture of all of the parties involved and a less compliant subject, Prabhakar said.
Security firms are once again in the case's crosshairs
"Kroll would have to provide who hired them, for what purpose, and all documents and footage and audio in their possession," Prabhakar told Insider. "Britney would then be armed with that information going in to deposing her father."
At the July hearing, Jamie Spears's attorneys requested that details of the deposition be limited to the public, accusing Rosengart of seeking the deposition to generate a "media circus."
Ashwani told Insider that if Britney's legal team were to depose Jamie without having pursued depositions with Kroll or Black Box, the end result could still be revealing.
"An ambush interview of Mr. Spears would allow for a good cross-examination of him," Prabhakar told Insider. "If he says under oath that he knows nothing of the audio and video recordings, the companies he hired to perform those tasks would under oath give contrary testimony, which can be used against him at trial to show, one, he lies under oath and, two, his testimony to a jury is worthless because it is self-serving, and he will likely plead the 5th amendment."
Britney's team suggests further legal action
In July, Rosengart signaled that Britney's legal term could pursuing further legal actions against Jamie Spears.
"Citing the 5th amendment can be used to discredit a witness in civil trials as opposed to criminal trials where the accused rarely testify," Prabhakar added.
On September 7, Jamie Spears filed a petition to end his daughter's conservatorship, which the pop star's legal team labeled as a "massive" legal victory. The conservatorship was officially terminated on November 12.
In the lead-up to the contentious July hearing, Jamie Spears asked for his daughter to be deposed because of allegations she's slung at him over social media.
Attorneys for both parties did not immediately return Insider's requests for comment.
A deposition for Britney is still up in the air–and could be in her favor
On Wednesday, Judge Brenda Penny will rule on whether Britney Spears will eventually have to sit for a deposition as well.
"If Ms. Spears is deposed, the testimony elicited would undercut Mr. Spears' case that she validly needed a guardian," Prabhakar told Insider. "If they question her about her own knowledge about everything that was going on, then she was not in need of a guardian."
The conservatorship, which was in place from 2008 to 2021, granted a group of people, including Jamie Spears, control over her personal, medical, and financial decisions partially due to a medical evaluation that said that Britney Spears was mentally unfit to make her own decisions. Rosengart pushed back against his client sitting for a deposition and told the court in July that, "you don't make the victim sit down with the victimizer."
Still, Prabhakar said that Britney Spears' best bet is to source as much evidence as possible from the security firms before deposing her father. Her legal team has claimed their discovery process has been impaired by a shoddy turnover of conservatorship documents, and that Jamie Spears has documents related to the spying.
"The deposition is simply not a cross-examination. It is never an attempt by an attorney to make the subject uncomfortable and hostile and is always used to make the subject of the cross examination comfortable and get them to open up about the evidence that has already been gathered against them, which in this case would be from Black Box and security firm Kroll," Prabhakar said. "There is no advantage gained by 'ambushing' Mr. Spears, unless is it is to generate publicity for the case."