One of Louisiana’s best-known celebrities since the turn of the century, singer Britney Spears was ubiquitous in pop culture through the first decade of the millennium. But as was made clear in the past year, Spears lost of lot of her autonomy after being placed in a conservatorship controlled by her father Jamie Spears.
The 2008 judgement followed a two-year span that saw the singing star suffer a number of public breakdowns, and the revelation of her plight in the 2021 Emmy-winning documentary “Framing Britney Spears” resulted in her eventual release from what she considered to be a stifling and demeaning arrangement.
An interesting bit of information about her struggle to end the conservatorship came to light Monday when Spears posted screenshots of text messages she sent in 2019 while confined in a mental health facility. The messages including one telling her mother Lynne that she had been unsuccessful in an attempt to contact "Mrs. Donna.”
That moniker may seem cryptic until paired with another text she sent to childhood friend Jansen Fitzgerald that read, “I need John bells number please. When u can,” revealing that “Mrs. Donna” is Louisiana first lady Donna Edwards, husband of Governor John Bel Edwards.
Edwards’s deputy chief of staff Eric Holl confirmed that Spears was indeed seeking the governor’s phone number. “The Spears and Edwards families have known each other for decades,” he said. Edwards hails from Amite, La., just 20 miles from Spears’s hometown of Kentwood.
Spears was seeking the governor’s aid as she searched for a lawyer at the time, though she was not granted the right to fire her court-appointed attorney and hire her own until two years later.
Spears was posting the text messages, which she captioned with the phrase “a little different with proof,” in response to texts her mother posted publicly, according to New York-based magazine Page Six. The singer has since deleted the post.
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