Britney Spears: ‘I Just Want My Life Back’

After requesting to address the judge directly, the singer gave an impassioned speech about her treatment under the conservatorship that controls her life and finances.

[Follow live updates on Britney Spears’s conservatorship hearing.] Britney Spears told a Los Angeles courtroom — and the world — that she desperately wants to end the conservatorship that has overseen her life for the last 13 years, calling it an abusive and controlling system in which she was drugged and forced to work against her will, during a bombshell 23-minute speech on Wednesday. “I’ve been in denial. I’ve been in shock. I am traumatized,” Ms. Spears said over the phone during the remote hearing, which she insisted be broadcast publicly. “I just want my life back.”