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Pop singer Britney Spears has reportedly been released after being arrested over a charge that’s not been made clear by Los Angeles police.
According to the Ventura County Sheriff’s office, she was detained on Wednesday night and records show she has court date fixed on 4 May.
Spears, born in Mississippi and raised in Louisiana, was a teen pop phenomenon who became a defining superstar of the ’90s and 2000s.
She rose to fame from Disney Channel’s The Mickey Mouse Club to MTV and beyond, with such era-defining hits like ‘… Baby One More Time,’ ‘Oops! … I Did It Again’ and ‘Toxic.’
Most of her albums have been certified platinum, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, with two diamond titles: 1999’s ‘ … Baby One More Time’ and 2000’s ‘Oops! … I Did It Again.’
Her last full-length album, Glory, was released in 2016.
Tabloid terror
Spears became a focus of tabloids in the early 2000s, and a source of public scrutiny, as she battled mental illness and paparazzi documented the details of her private life.
Later, as the court of public opinion evolved to recognise the misogynistic media coverage of the time, Spears’ fight to control her life became the focus of the #FreeBritney movement.
In 2008, Spears was placed under a court-ordered conservatorship, run primarily by her father and his lawyers, that would control her personal and financial decisions for well over a decade.
She won the legal battle and the conservatorship was dissolved in 2021. Two years later, she released a bestselling, tell-all memoir, “The Woman in Me.”
After Spears was finally freed of the conservatorship in November 2021, it was unclear whether the singer will ever even perform again.
“Not doing my music any more is a way of saying ‘f**k you’,” she wrote on her Instagram account, now deactivated.
However, four years ago she did team-up with legendary pop icon Elton John to record and release the single ‘Hold Me Closer’, a piece blending some of John’s previous hits, including ‘Tiny Dancer’, ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’ and ‘The One’.