We’re all well aware at this point about Britney Spears‘ conservators keeping her from getting married.
In addition to other alleged abuses (like being forced to have a birth control device maintained in her body), the Toxic singer claimed in court that she was not allowed to get married to longtime boyfriend Sam Asghar, something we’ve heard they both want.
But it sounds like her team was responsible for blocking her desires for marriage once before. At least that’s the story Jason Alexander is telling.
For those who don’t remember, Britney and the model were married in Las Vegas in the first few hours of 2004. The two had been childhood friends and reportedly hatched the plan to marry on a whim. Alexander told Access Hollywood at the time:
“It was just crazy, man. And we were just looking at each other and said, ‘Let’s do something wild, crazy. Let’s go get married, just for the hell of it.’”
Just hours later, her team sprang into action. Her record label, Jive, put out a public statement saying the friends “took a joke too far.” Meanwhile her lawyers got both parties to agree to an annulment — making the marriage legally nonexistent. No divorce, no money, no mess.
At the time Britney’s attorney, David Chesnoff, petitioned for the quickie annulment by saying Britney “lacked understanding of her actions to the extent that she was incapable of agreeing to the marriage.” Sounds kind of familiar these days, doesn’t it?
But the petition wasn’t even arguing Britney was drunk or under the influence of anything else. They just said she couldn’t decide for herself. Huh.
The petition was granted immediately — hence the marriage being a rather impressively short 55 hours — only because both bride and groom signed the petition agreeing to the annulment. Chesnoff said at the time:
“Jason agreed to this completely. They’ve made a wise decision. I know they care about each other. They are friends.”
But now Alexander is saying he was the one who “lacked understanding” — as he was tricked into the breakup. Speaking on the latest episode of the Toxic: The Britney Spears Story podcast, the model reveals:
“They told me if I would sign the contracts — the annulment — they would let me and Britney continue our relationship, and if we felt the same way in six months they would give us a proper marriage.”
Wow. So it sounds like the marriage wasn’t a joke to him — he was serious about being with Britney! But he agreed to slow things down because he thought everything would continue and they would get married for real soon after:
“So I had no reason to believe otherwise. I thought that’s what the truth was. They were allowing Britney and I to still have phone communication. So we were talking every day and I still believed the story I was told, that they were going to let us continue to talk and then we would have this marriage, right, in the future if we felt the same way.”
He says his lawyers at the time told him to contest the annulment within 30 days if he wanted any chance of staying in contact with her. He didn’t believe them.
But as soon as the window closed and he was not longer able to legally contest, Alexander says Britney’s team forced her to ghost him by disconnecting the phone they’d been talking on every day!
“Literally the day after, like, the 30 days was up, I remember trying to call the number I had for Britney and it was like, ‘Beep, beep, beep.’ I’m like, ‘F**k, they got me! Motherf**ker!’ So that was it.”
Man, that really changes things, doesn’t it? It certainly doesn’t sound like he remembers this whole ordeal the way it was portrayed in the media at the time.
Speaking about how the famous nuptials came to be in the first place, the Louisiana native describes being up all night with Brit in her hotal room when she came up with a way to keep him in her life:
“It was like five in the morning, we’re still in bed talking. And she wanted me to come on tour with her. And I was like, ‘I can’t. I love to come on tour with you, but I got to go back and I have my senior year football. I earned a scholarship. I’m not going to just walk away.’ And that was when she was like, ‘Well, I got something I got to ask’ and I’m like, ‘What’s that? And then she pretty much asked me if I would get married.”
Even then, this was Britney’s way of getting around her team — who she knew didn’t want her weighed down by a high school sweetheart. She thought marriage was a bond they couldn’t break:
“We felt like this was a way that would bond us together, regardless of how far we are separated. We’re married. You can’t not let us reunite.”
So they snuck out of the hotel and found one of the many chapels in Vegas where you can get hitched on a lark, 24/7.
“We went to a Little White Wedding Chapel. The limousine driver walked her down the aisle. We did the whole thing. There was another couple getting married that morning. So they recognized her. And we took a picture. Later I found out that couple got paid like a hundred grand for that picture. So I was like, ‘What a great wedding gift for them.’”
Makes sense! People are still using that photo 17 years later!
Alexander gets a little personal next, answering a question a lot of folks had back then — yes, they had time to have sex as a married couple:
“We left, consummated the marriage in the limousine on the way back to the hotel.”
But that was the end of the good part. The something borrowed for the wedding ended up being borrowed time! He recalls:
“And then when we got back to the hotel — ‘Hey, guess what? We’re married!’ and everybody freaked out and no one was happy. And I was like, ‘Oh, this is about to get interesting.’”
In a way he was right. The team did their thing and killed the marriage. The rest is history.
And of course, history has not been kind, at least recently, to the folks who have kept Britney under their thumb. The #FreeBritney movement grew by leaps and bounds to become the vast majority in the past couple weeks as the pop star finally spoke out in court against her conservatorship, accusing her father Jamie Spears and others of abusing their positions.
How does her childhood sweetie and (technically) first husband feel about all this?
According to the Twitter account @FreeBritneyLive, someone purported to be Alexander reached out with a rather ominous quote about the court hearing. The person, they said, claimed to be Britney’s ex and said he was “forced to sign an NDA but cannot in good faith stay silent about the things I saw happening.”
The message — which circulated online but has not been vetted by any major news outlet nor confirmed by Alexander in this interview — continues:
“Even back in the day we all saw signs of Jamie’s greed. He had his daughter on a tight chain then just like he does now. I don’t want to get into it too much because it ain’t my story to be telling but when Britney does finally do any interview or write a book or whatever she chooses to do if she chooses to do that, I can say with fact the things she reveals will be bone chilling to the core.”
Is he referring in some small part to tricking her first husband into a breakup?? It would certainly fit.
The message goes on:
“Her testimony last week doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of everything she’s been had to endure and it goes beyond the 13 year conservatorship.”
Certainly it sounds from this story like Britney was very much under the control of her team — be that her father, her lawyers, her record label, whomever — since well before the conservatorship. Remember, the legal mechanism was set up in 2008, supposedly in response to Britney’s substance abuse and mental health issues. But they were already determining her fate in 2004 and before.
Look at the details of the story: She had to sneak out in order to leave her hotel. She already believed she had to marry at 22 years old just to keep from having her boyfriend taken from her — and when she did he was cut off from contacting her anyway, apparently by subterfuge. Her mental state was being called into question in order to get the legal result her team wanted. They said she “lacked understanding of her actions.”
How long was Britney being controlled before she was under a conservatorship??
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