Who’s to blame if Britney Spears has been ‘devoured’ by celebrity?

All the questions around Britney Spears can be condensed into this one: who should we blame? For a long time, there was a comfortable narrative that the pop star’s decade-long descent — from virginal queen of teen in 1998, to junk-food scarfing, twice-divorced single mother, to broken woman being transported to hospital in restraints — was wholly her own doing. Britney was a train wreck, white trash, a hot mess and, all in all, no better than she ought to be.

The fact that her career recovered dramatically after she was placed under a conservatorship arrangement in 2008 (giving her father ultimate control over her life and finances) seemed to prove that the under-lying problem had been her freedom. Under his watch she got thin again, and her Vegas residencies made astonishing money. But from this point on, there was an untenable conflict in the Britney machine.

Her persona was of someone in command and at ease with her status as an icon. In ‘If You Seek Amy’, made post-conservatorship, she teases: ‘Love me, hate me, say what you want about me/ But all of the boys and all of the girls are begging to, if you seek Amy’. (Say it out loud, away from children.) It has swagger, but sung by a woman who couldn’t legally decide who she spoke to, never mind slept with, this was hard to take.

Some fans spotted the contradiction, and a rival version of the Spears story emerged. What if she wasn’t a self-destructive young woman restored to function by a kindly patriarch, but an exploited victim of legally enabled coercion? What if her supposed derangement — the partying, the head-shaving, the lashing out at the press — was actually an understandable response to the extreme pressure of being inhumanly famous for her entire adult life?