Britney Spears ' legal team accused her father of paying a security firm from the singer's estate to monitor her.Jamie Spears once asked the firm to mirror Britney's iCloud account to allow him to see her communications in real-time, per the documents.
Jamie Spears paid a security firm $6 million from Britney Spears' estate to electronically monitor his daughter and his ex-wife, Britney Spears' attorney claimed in new court documents.
Mathew Rosengart, Britney Spears' attorney, filed the new documents ahead of a hearing on Wednesday in the singer's ongoing legal battle in connection to her recently terminated conservatorship. The current court battle is over payments from her estate, including Jamie Spears asking the court to have his daughter cover his legal fees before the conservatorship was terminated.
Between 2008 and 2021, Spears was under a legal arrangement that granted control of her personal life and estate to a group of individuals including her father. On September 7, Jamie Spears filed a petition to end Britney Spears' conservatorship, which the pop star's legal team labeled as a "massive" legal victory. The conservatorship was officially terminated on November 12.
On Tuesday, The New York Times first reported that Jamie Spears paid security firm Black Box to obtain private phone records and collect GPS "ping data" from Britney Spears and her mother Lynne.
Attorneys for Jamie Spears did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment on the allegations made in the court documents.
During the Wednesday hearing, Jamie Spears' lawyers responded to the filing by Rosengart, denying the claims made in the document.
According to the court documents filed by Rosengart, Alex Vlasov, a former employee of Black Box, confirmed to ex-FBI Special Agent Sherine Ebadi that the security firm treated Britney Spears as its client and her father was the person giving direction.
Black Box was already monitoring phones used by the singer when Vlasov began working at the company in 2012, and the firm "cycled through several different technologies, including various monitoring software, to accomplish the secret surveillance" of Britney Spears, according to court documents and a sworn declaration by Ebadi included in the filings by Rosengart.
When Britney Spears changed her Blackberry to an iPhone in 2013, the swap caused a "temporary cessation of monitoring," according to court documents.
"Mr. Spears expressed great concern about not having visibility into his daughter's phone activity during this period," according to the court documents, which were filed on Friday but not made public until Tuesday night. Vlasov was tasked with finding surveillance software and installing it as a "hidden 'app'" on Britney Spears' phone, which she "could not see and to which she did not have the password," per the court documents.
Vlasov sometimes shared the pop star's private communications directly to her father, according to the court documents.
In 2015, Jamie Spears asked Black Box to mirror his daughter's iCloud account to a separate iPad, allowing him to see her text messages and contents in real-time, according to court documents.
"Black Box did as Mr. Spears instructed, purchasing an iPad and linking it to Britney Spears's iCloud account. The iPad was kept in a safe in Black Box's offices," according to the court documents.
"In directing these surveillance efforts, Mr. Spears had Black Box provide him access to private communications of his daughter, which his own counsel advised he had no right to see," the court filings said. "Mr. Spears expressed particular interest in monitoring his daughter's communications with her personal attorney Sam Ingham, and he wanted regular updates from Black Box on the substance of those attorney-client privileged messages."
During the contentious Wednesday hearing, Jamie Spears' attorneys pushed back on these assertions, saying, "Virtually everything alleged was a lie. They are all nonsense."
Black Box did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the allegations made in Rosengart's filings.