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#FreeBritney movement resurges after star’s hotel fight sparks conservatorship fears

The costs of fame in the US are playing out for the singer as specter of return to an old, unhappy chapter of life looms

Britney Spears has known the highs and lows of how the US treats its celebrities, traveling from Mickey Mouse club child actor to teen pop icon, to global superstar – and then more than a decade under legal conservatorship after a mental health crisis before winning freedom, for the first time perhaps, to be herself. But now there are fears of a new chapter in Spears’s saga, or the return to an old unhappy one, after she reportedly had a late-night fight with her boyfriend at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles resulting in paramedics being called and pictures of a barefoot pop princess, mostly naked save for a pillow and a blanket, appeared in the tabloids. Photograph: Carlos Álvarez/Getty ImagesLast year, Spears published The Woman in Me, a stand-out autobiography in which she wrote freely about trying to cope with the pressures of being one of the most famous women in the world, and her struggle to get out of a 13-year court ordered conservatorship that had given control of almost every aspect of her life to her father and lawyers, including access to her three children.

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