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The Curse of Kentwood

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On May 29, 1966, Jamie Spears was 13 years old, an eighth-grade honor-roll student small for his age, the son of a father a friend describes as “a fireball on steroids.” Jamie had three siblings, ages 3 and 5 and 8, and there ought to have been another one, the second born, but Austin Wayne Spears died at 3 days old, leaving Jamie alone again with his parents. The family lived near the Mississippi line in Kentwood, Louisiana, 70 miles from the hospital where Austin Wayne was born, far from anything then and far from anything now. Generations back and generations forward they lived and would live here, in Tangipahoa Parish, in the bare little towns that ran along the train tracks. The baby had been buried below an oak tree in a small cemetery loud with the buzzing of cicadas. Jamie’s mother was named Emma Jean Forbes, and everyone called her Jean. She was small, like her husband and son, and she was blonde, and she had married when she was 16 years old, which was older than her mother had been when she married in Mississippi. Later, her husband would tell the coroner that Jean had tried to kill herself three times, but whether to believe her husband, and what part he might have played in what unfolded in May 1966, remains in question.

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Jamie Spears’s trailer in Kentwood in 2021.Photo: SplashNews.com/SplashNews.com

Across town, Jo Ann went back to Mandeville, and June Austin collected his children Leigh Ann and John Mark. These children, he told the court later, “were in such physical and mental state,” their heads “full of fleas and nits and lice.” He took them to New York in search of work, though he did not have permanent custody. When he returned to Kentwood some years later, Jo Ann wanted her kids back. June Austin would not give them back, and so they went to court.

The court interrogated Jo Ann as to her fitness as a mother.

“In your motion that is before the court today,” June Austin’s lawyer said, “you just stated that you had been in Mandeville and you referred to a nervous disorder.”

“I have never referred to it as a nervous disorder,” Jo Ann said.

“That was the term used in your petition.”

“Well that is a very broad term.”

“Could you be more specific.”

“Well I don’t know how much time we have for this,” she said, “but if you want to hear it I am manic depressive.”

The court awarded custody to June Austin, the man who had technically kidnapped them. Leigh Ann, Jo Ann’s daughter, would later say June Austin sexually assaulted her multiple times. John Mark, Jo Ann’s son, would call him a monster who beat his children and drove his wives to madness.

Lynne was pregnant within a month of marrying Jamie. They lived in Lynne’s trailer, and he brought her fried chicken and frozen grapes until the arrival of Bryan James, at which point he started drinking. “In our lives together,” Lynne writes, “if someone was sick or even dying, Jamie would find a way to act up and direct everyone’s attention to him.” In 1978, Lynne’s father was crushed to death by his own milk truck. Jamie disappeared for a week. Lynne went back to school, and Jamie told her she was too stupid to graduate.

When he was around,” Jamie Lynn writes of her father, “he spent much of his time in a chair trying to convince everyone else he wasn’t drunk.

Jamie Spears promised to stop drinking, got drunk, and made more promises. On the baby’s third Christmas, Jamie was not, according to a court filing, at home with his family. He was at Baby Tate’s Bar in Tangipahoa, where someone in this exceedingly small community evidently told Lynne he was “hugging, kissing, and fondling” one Cindy Ballard, whom he then took back to his place, Lot 13 in Simpson’s Trailer Park. Lynne filed for porce and a restraining order alleging he might become violent when he heard about the porce. June Austin showed up with his third wife and begged Lynne to give Jamie another chance. Lynne retracted her filing and had a child the next year. By the time she was a teenager, this child would look an awful lot like Jamie’s late mother, but they would not have known that when they named her Britney Jean.

Jamie promised to quit drinking. He “rededicated himself to God.” He tried to drive drunk with 5-year-old Britney in the car, and when his little brother Willie reached for the keys, Jamie punched him in the face. When Lynne worked, she left Britney with Jean’s mother, Lexie, who would have noticed that Britney had inherited Jean’s smile, eyes, and nose. Lexie had a crawfish place called Granny’s Seafood Deli; Jamie worked there on and off, as did little Britney, which is to say that Jean’s mother, Jean’s son, and Jean’s granddaughter all cooked together, four generations of which one had been horrifically lost. Britney worried about having her grandmother’s name; she thought perhaps it was cursed. Britney sang at the First Baptist Church, and after church everyone went to Papa June’s for dinner, where he lifted Britney onto the dinner table and she sang some more.

Jamie was fitfully employed as a boilermaker and a builder and a cook. Later, people would try to argue that he and Lynne were stage parents, but when Britney, who had excelled at Bela Karolyi’s elite gymnastics camp, wanted to stop taking gymnastics altogether, she stopped. She was, her teachers said, internally motivated, a perfectionist, a workhorse. Jamie told anyone who would listen that his daughter was going to be a star. Jamie and Lynne paid their taxes irregularly. They missed car payments. They made unorthodox financial choices, like paying for their daughter’s various lessons and competition-related travel instead of all their taxes, and sending their children to a private school established on the eve of integration, where, when asked whether the school served any Black children, an administrative assistant responded that they had children with the last name Black. They spent all their money on their children; they believed utterly in Britney’s future stardom. Later, the story everyone told was of a family that could barely feed itself, but they were not poor. They were messy. They lived in a solid home with long front windows and a big yard. Lynne owned a day-care center, and Jamie started a gym that went out of business.

Bryan, age 8, broke his hand, his leg, and his arm riding a motorized dirt bike; he was placed in a half-body cast. Bryan, age 10, fell riding the same motorbike and was so thoroughly burned by the exhaust pipe that he had to have the burn regularly cleaned at the hospital as he screamed. Jamie promised he wasn’t drunk as Lynne watched him stumble in front of a mirror. They were dressed up, on their way to Jean’s mother’s birthday party. Britney beat 20,000 other kids to be cast in The Mickey Mouse Club, and Lynne’s mother died in a swimming pool. Jamie got a vasectomy but did not appear for his follow-up appointment. Jamie and Lynne had another daughter, whom they named Jamie Lynn.

“When he was around,” Jamie Lynn writes of her father, “he spent much of his time in a chair trying to convince everyone else he wasn’t drunk.” Lynne began teaching Britney how to drive with Jamie Lynn in the car. “No one wore seat belts back then,” Jamie Lynn writes; this would have been 1997. Britney swerved over the midline, nearly hit a car, and drove into a ditch. Lynne switched places with Britney in the car so her husband wouldn’t know she was letting Britney drive. “Momma always cared more about Daddy’s feelings than doing the right thing,” Jamie Lynn writes. “Momma often put us in a difficult position rather than confronting the situation head-on.” While she was shopping with Jamie Lynn, Lynne’s card was declined at the Limited Too. Jamie and Lynne defaulted on a mortgage; the land was seized and auctioned off. Three years later, a sheriff took their Ford Probe from the body shop; they owed $10,000. Jamie and Lynne filed for bankruptcy in July 1998. “… Baby One More Time” was released three months later, when Britney Jean Spears was 16 years old.

From left: Jamie giving Britney grits in a 2008 MTV documentary. Photo: MTVBritney and Jamie arrive at LAX in 2008. Photo: SplashNews.com/SplashNews.comFrom top: Jamie giving Britney grits in a 2008 MTV documentary. Photo: MTVBritney and Jamie arrive at LAX in 2008. Photo: SplashNews.com/SplashNews.co… moreFrom top: Jamie giving Britney grits in a 2008 MTV documentary. Photo: MTVBritney and Jamie arrive at LAX in 2008. Photo: SplashNews.com/SplashNews.com

Britney Spears is a 40-year-old woman who has enjoyed a total of nine years of independence from her parents’ control. The years went like this: … Baby One More Time sold 11 million records, Oops! … I Did It Again 9 million. Britney debuted at No. 1. According to her sister, Britney told her mother she would build her a new house on the condition that she porce her father. Lynne porced him, moved into the Kentwood mansion Britney built her, and let Jamie come over. Jamie lived in Britney’s childhood home, the interior of which was now covered, presumably by him, with Britney’s face: ticket stubs and records and concert posters and magazine covers and framed pictures. Her bedroom was bare because everything in it had been relocated to a model bedroom in a little museum downtown. Some girls who had just graduated from a Catholic high school in New Orleans drove to Kentwood to the house where Britney had grown up. Jamie emerged, loosed four dogs, and pulled a gun on them.

Britney Jean Spears lived in a 9,000-square-foot house cut into the Hollywood Hills. She starred in a road movie written with the purpose of her starring in it. She lifted aloft a seven-foot Burmese python known as Banana and draped it over herself as she moaned “I’m a Slave 4 U” and hit every step.

When he was in L.A., Jamie seemed to become only more determinedly Kentwood. Sometimes he found work as a cook. He cooked venison sausage and crawfish and pulled pork and quail breast with bacon. There was no secret, he said. It was simple southern food, like the kind Jean’s mother would cook with him. Jamie went to rehab in 2004 and was sober for a while and found God again. He became entangled with the Evangelical wife of a Tennessee pastor, a high-school graduate who rode a Harley and claimed to “love nothing more than ministering to other women.” The pastor’s wife owned a business-management firm; she became Jamie Lynn’s business manager. She loaned Jamie money, and he paid her back.

Britney married her backup dancer, had two children in quick succession, porced the backup dancer, and became what the press called erratic and unstable and, very often, crazy, though to many people later on, she looked like a person going through her 20s. She shaved her head. She spent a month in rehab. She performed lethargically at the VMAs, a step behind, as if thinking about something else. She missed a court-ordered drug test, was accused of driving with her kids without a California license, and lost custody of them. She began living with a man she met at a nightclub, Sam Lutfi, who called himself her manager. The press often quoted people from Kentwood saying that Britney Spears needed to “come home.” But Britney Spears did not go home to Kentwood. Kentwood came to her.

In 2007, Britney Spears, 25, lived in a 7,500-square-foot Studio City mansion with a pool and a yard and space shielded by walls of greenery. She found out that 16-year-old Jamie Lynn was pregnant by reading OK! magazine. From afar, Lynne and Jamie felt Lutfi was controlling Britney: In a petition for a restraining order, they accused him of drugging their daughter into compliance, crushing up pills and putting them into her food, disabling her cars, calling her a bad mother and a whore. (Sam Lutfi’s lawyer denied these allegations.) At the end of a supervised visit with the boys, Britney locked herself in a bathroom with her baby. Giving him back was like losing a child every single time. Someone called the police and Britney was strapped to a gurney, hospitalized, and deprived of further visitation rights. The press referred to this as a meltdown, the modern term for nervous disorder.

“Something drastic would have to happen for Sam to lose control and for Jamie to gain control of his daughter,” Lynne writes, laying out what appeared to her to be the available options. Jamie, who had not been central to Britney’s career, not gone to Orlando or New York, was suddenly dramatic, obsessive, engaged. Something had shifted. His daughter had in some sense lost her children, a tragedy that could drive a mother into darkness. “She used to talk about how she couldn’t believe she was named after her grandmother who killed herself,” Jamie’s brother William said at the time. “Now we are worried the same will happen to her.” He was talking, at the time, to the pastor’s wife. (Her attorney says she did not push for the creation of the conservatorship.) Jamie was praying and fasting. It was in times of sickness, Lynne said, that he made his presence known.

There did not seem to be anything in Jamie that craved opulence. He sought something else.

Lynne came to visit Britney at the mansion, and when the gates opened, Jamie sneaked in behind her. At the door, the manager, Sam Lutfi, told Jamie to leave; Britney, he said, was afraid of her father. Jamie, the manager alleged in court, lunged at him, fists balled, spitting, shouting, and chased him around Britney’s kitchen island. He was going to beat the hell out of him. Security removed Jamie. The manager, Britney, and Lynne went to Rite Aid, where Britney bought a lipstick. The next morning, Jamie showed up and punched the manager in the solar plexus.

Three days later, Britney was again hospitalized against her will. June Austin, 78 and a widower three times over, said he was worried about her. “She shouldn’t go in the nut house,” he said. “Sometimes you come out worse than you go in.” It was the same year that Jo Ann, the woman June Austin had had institutionalized against her will, died in poverty. She had become, late in life, highly medicated, vacant. Her daughter had her grave inscribed THY TRIALS ARE OVER, THY REST IS WON.

Jamie submitted a document requesting that he become Britney’s conservator, though this was not to be a typical conservatorship because the conservatee was not elderly, but a 26-year-old woman capable of generating hundreds of millions of dollars. The document suggested Britney suffered from dementia; the accuracy of this diagnosis would be contested. On the Today show the pastor’s wife instructed everyone to pray to God to “intercede” for the Spears family. Jamie put the pastor’s wife’s company in charge of Britney’s finances; her company would be intimately involved in the day-to-day conduct of Britney’s life. Britney was no longer in control of herself or her money.

In January 2008, Jamie had to sneak into Britney’s home. Shortly thereafter, Britney’s conservator walked freely into her large, dark, Italianate kitchen. He was hovering over a stove in a white tank and jeans, with both eyeglasses and sunglasses hanging around his neck, beside the island around which he had chased the manager. He had won. “I’m ready to go. I’m making my baby some cheesy grits,” he told a documentarian. “Grits is a old southern tradition. She’s been eating them since she was born, she loves them. I don’t have no sprinkle cheese, so I’m just putting her momma’s old-timey way here, doing it with just some Velveeta in it.” He licked some off a spatula, walked the grits to a bathroom where Britney was having her hair dried, and handed them to her. He wasn’t sure there was enough butter and cheese, but she said there was. She called him “Daddy”; he called her “Baby.” He could be brought to tears just looking at her, how beautiful she was. “Daddy!” she said of his tears. “I don’t understand how he can be such an asshole and then so nice!” When he tried to give creative input — he thought she should be thinking about other women as she sang “Womanizer” — she nodded and looked away, the way you do when a man traps you at a party, and made fun of him later. She and the team yelled at each other. He called her fat, she mocked him to his face, he cried. “Gimme that phone,” he said. “No, Daddy!” she replied.

There did not seem to be anything in Jamie that craved opulence. He did his own laundry when the others sent theirs out. He did not live in a stately house Britney bought him, as her mother did; his addresses were modest. He sought something else. He exerted what Lynne called “absolutely microscopic control” over every detail of Britney’s life. Britney wanted sushi for dinner; she was told sushi was expensive, she had had sushi yesterday. She wanted a pair of Skechers; she was told there wasn’t the budget for it. She was not allowed alcohol, and she was not allowed coffee, and she was not allowed to restain her kitchen cabinets. She was not allowed to drive and was only intermittently allowed a phone, which would, according to some members of a security team hired by Jamie, be surveilled. Close friends were removed from her life.

“My dad isn’t smart enough to even think of a conservatorship,” Britney said later on Instagram, and many people agreed with her; they blamed the company he kept. But it was Jamie to whom the team would turn when Britney was disobedient. It was Jamie who would threaten, should she refuse to work, to prevent her from seeing her children. It was his name on the paperwork that stripped her of autonomy. It was Jamie, drunk on power, who said, “I am Britney Spears.”

Britney returned to work immediately. She released an album. Because she had lost weight and begun working, many people said Jamie had “saved” her. Britney repeated this to the press; her father had saved her. Britney went on tour to 20 cities. “I don’t know, can she rehearse on her birthday?” someone asked an executive who worked for the pastor’s wife. “She’s gonna rehearse” was the response. Jamie hovered. They were shooting a scene in which she kissed a man; she asked her manager to ask him to leave because he made her uncomfortable. When Britney’s trailer was too hot, he duct-taped an air conditioner to a cylinder and piped it in. A “redneck air conditioner,” he called it. “Don’t go nowhere without duct tape.” “Daddy!” she said.

For Jamie, there were threats everywhere. Who wouldn’t want what his daughter had? She was too easily influenced, subject to predators, to men playing mind games. When she found a phone and called the manager, this was evidence that she was still being controlled; Jamie got a restraining order against him. When she covertly tried to hire her own lawyer to get out of the conservatorship, this too was evidence that she was being manipulated; Jamie got a restraining order against the lawyer. It was best if Britney were kept isolated from anyone who might try to, in the words of Jamie’s lawyers, “disrupt the conservatorship,” which was, after all, for her, in her interest, an expression of his love and devotion, a burden he had taken on to save her. His daughter wasn’t well versed in the ways of the world. Much like him, she was inarticulate, trapped within her extraordinary physicality. She couldn’t see through people trying to take what she had. “The best thing for her is what she’s doing right now,” Jamie told the documentarian. “She’s in her element. She’s in her world. Keepin’ her busy. Like me? I like to go fishing. She likes to sing and dance.” Jamie told Lynne their daughter was best treated like a “racehorse.”

A man who had trouble paying his taxes, had declared bankruptcy, had run a small business into the ground now found himself in control of his superstar daughter’s finances. With the money Britney made working at times against her will, her estate paid a lawyer the court had assigned to her hundreds of thousands of dollars a year; this lawyer never informed her, she told the court, that she could petition to end the conservatorship. Jamie’s lawyers fought to keep her inside the conservatorship and charged the hours to Britney’s estate; the estate paid Jamie $6 million, and dozens of different law firms’ fees totaling $30 million. The estate paid her brother; it is unclear for what. The estate paid $1.5 million for repairs and maintenance on her mother’s mansion in Kentwood; the estate paid Jamie Lynn’s husband (also, incredibly, named Jamie) $178,000 for “professional services” to this single house. Jamie decided, around 2015, that he ought to have a cooking show. It would be called Cookin’ Cruzin’ and Chaos With Jamie Spears and would involve a tour bus he retro-fitted and on which he painted a crawfish with a chef’s hat cooking over a cauldron that read KENTWOOD, LOUISIANA. There was never any show. According to Britney, he was drinking again.

Years stretched to a decade of Britney having to barter for dinner. All the youthful delicacy was gone from Jamie’s face; he looked thick-jowled and ragged. A hole appeared in his large intestine, and he spent a month in the hospital. June Austin passed away. Banana, thriving, grew to be 15 feet long. Jamie Lynn’s daughter was riding an ATV while her mother, Jamie Lynn, and her father, Jamie Watson, looked on; she flipped it into a pond, fell unconscious, and nearly died.

Britney refused to do a dance move and was, she said, hospitalized for four months and put on lithium, as Jo Ann had been. Britney did not have regular access to a phone, but she did have an Instagram account mediated by a social-media team; this quirky account was the subject of a podcast hosted by two comedians. A whistleblower, an anonymous paralegal, called in to the podcast and told these comedians that Britney had been forced into a mental-health facility against her will as retaliation for driving and refusing medication. Over time, hundreds of thousands of people became committed to the cause of freeing Britney Spears. “The world don’t have a clue,” Jamie told a journalist. These people were “conspiracy theorists.” Jamie allegedly busted through a door and got into a fight with Britney’s 13-year-old son. The boy’s father was granted a restraining order from the man in control of the boy’s mother.

Her de facto indentured servitude endured for 13 years, at the end of which Britney Spears begged once again to be freed. “I cried on the phone for an hour,” Britney told the judge, “and he loved every minute of it. The control he had over someone as powerful as me — he loved the control to hurt his own daughter, one hundred thousand percent. He loved it.” She thought he and her entire family belonged in prison.

Her family seemed puzzled, bewildered by the suggestion that it might have gone any other way. In the one interview he did, from the home Britney built her mother, Britney’s brother, Bryan, made a joke about how pushy women in his family always get their way. He agreed that perhaps it made sense to end the conservatorship, which had been “a great thing for our family,” but didn’t quite see how things could work with Britney granted the rights of an adult. “Oh, so are you gonna call and make reservations for yourself today?” he asked. “Like, if you’re coming into life and you’ve never had to do something, and having to learn it, it’s going to be an adjustment … everyday-task stuff is probably gonna be a great challenge, like driving,” he said. “She is the worst driver in the world.” The interviewer gently suggested Uber and an executive assistant.

Two people who did not seem confused were Leigh Ann and John Mark, the children June Austin had with Jo Ann. “Typical for this family and how they treat their women,” Leigh Ann told a journalist. “Jamie did to her what my daddy did to my mom and Emma Jean. They are mean and they will destroy you if they can’t control you.”

“These Spears men are something awful,” John Mark told the same journalist. “He ruined Emma Jean and he ruined my mama. He shipped them both off to Mandeville from time to time. So I’m not too surprised about what Jamie’s done to Britney. It’s all about control with the Spears men.” A judge declared the conservatorship ended, and fans popped pink confetti outside the courthouse. A lawyer for Jamie Spears failed to respond to a detailed set of questions from New York Magazine.

A princess freed from a tower is meant to go back to being a princess. Britney, restored to herself, did not do interviews. She stayed on Instagram, apparently unfiltered, where she reached the fans who had finally brought the conservatorship to broader awareness. But it was not the release for which many of them had hoped. She posted endless Reels of herself twirling wildly in yellow ruffles and dark eyeliner. An astonishing number of women told me that after supporting the Free Britney movement, they had regretfully unfollowed her; her posts had become uncomfortable to watch. She seemed unwell. Missing was the control that had turned her into someone we thought we knew: Britney’s unparalleled command of her body, her mastery of self-presentation, that sense that she could become precisely the person she wanted us to see. The connection had been ruptured. The It was gone. This was, in public, unsayable, because it seemed to imply a justification for the conservatorship, but of course social-media posts that provoke unwanted feelings do not justify the abridgment of a woman’s most basic rights. They merely suggest that one cannot be returned to the status of a child for 13 years, placed under the dictatorial control of a damaged man, and emerge unchanged.

A station wagon full of students from Valley Forge, the private white high school, smashed into a parked truck; four of the children died, and the school eventually closed. Collis Temple bought the building that had once housed Kentwood’s Black high school and turned it into a Head Start location, an educational center on the history of Black high schools, and housing for veterans. A local historian discovered there had been a train wreck in Kentwood in 1903 on those tracks that connect the little towns — Osyka, Amite, Kentwood, Tangipahoa — and 75 men had died, some with playing cards still in their hands. Carpenter crews arrived to build coffins and place the bodies in a mass grave. The historian’s name is Antoinette Harrell, and she will tell you with no hint of irony that she is still an outsider here in Kentwood because she is originally from Amite, 20 minutes south, and has lived here for only 17 years.

A place where you can be an outsider for 17 years is a place that keeps its secrets. June Austin “pulled the trigger one way or another” is Leigh Ann’s description of Jean’s death. When I asked a family member what she had heard about June Austin, she said she had only heard he had killed his wife. “Drove her to her death?” I clarified. “No,” she said. “Literally.” But the story that matters here is the story Jamie was told, which is the one everyone was told in the small town where people lived fast and died so often on the little roads winding through the tall trees.

A year has passed since Britney Spears was freed from the control of her father. Lynne, estranged from Britney Jean, lives in the mansion Britney built for her. Jamie, still friendly with his football teammates and most of the town they entertained 50 years ago, chooses to live ten miles away in an RV parked on a vast, perfectly manicured lawn, behind a wooden fence with a gate sign that reads BEWARE OF DOG, four miles from the cemetery where his mother lived and died. Looming over the small RV is a large warehouse, and inside that warehouse are trunks full of stuff belonging to a beautiful woman who resembles no one as much as his mother. Here are the giant shimmering angel wings, here the red ringmaster’s jacket, underwear, the little green top in which she sang about being a slave.

There is no answer to the question of why Jamie Spears effectively imprisoned his daughter for 13 years. If there is, it isn’t here in Osyka, under an ancient moss-furred oak in a graveyard loud with the low buzz of cicadas. Yet it would be hard to conjure a deeper wound than this: not just to be left with an abusive man by a loving mother at the fragile age of 13, but left over her grief for another boy, as if to say, “You, the living son, the eldest son, are not enough.” The opposite of seeking total control over another person is not the establishment of healthy boundaries. The opposite of control is this: a soft wind over a hard stone, a mother present at breakfast gone by dusk, the insistent whisper of that terrible word, abandoned.

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