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Britney Spears’ estranged dad, Jamie Spears, denies bugging the pop star’s bedroom while serving as her conservator.
Jamie, 69, submitted a sworn declaration to the Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, nine months after a bombshell New York Times documentary accused him of recording Britney, 40, in her Thousand Oaks, Calif., home.
“I am informed of the allegation … that a listening device or ‘bug’ was placed [in] her bedroom as surveillance during the conservatorship. This allegation is false,” Jamie says in court documents exclusively obtained by Page Six.
“I never conducted or authorized any surveillance of Britney’s bedroom at any time, including during the conservatorship,” he adds. “I am not aware of any such surveillance having occurred.”
Jamie also says “under penalty of perjury” that “if called and sworn as a witness,” he “could and would testify” that his declaration is “true and correct.”
Britney’s attorney, Mathew Rosengart, did not immediately respond to Page Six’s request for comment.
In “The New York Times Presents: Controlling Britney Spears,” which premiered on FX and Hulu in September 2021, a former security employee claimed that Jamie had secretly captured audio recordings of Britney in her bedroom, including conversations with her children, in addition to monitoring the text messages, calls and internet history on her cellphone.
The whistleblower, Alex Vlasov — whose firm, Black Box Security, Jamie hired to protect Britney during her conservatorship — supported his allegations by providing the alleged recordings, emails and texts to the Times, which concurrently published a front-page report detailing what it described as “an intense surveillance apparatus.”
Jamie’s then-lawyer, Vivian Lee Thoreen, said in a statement in the documentary that her client’s “actions were done with the knowledge and consent of Britney, her court-appointed attorney [Samuel D. Ingham III] and/or the court,” though neither explicitly denied Vlasov’s claims at the time.
Jamie also notably did not deny in Wednesday’s deposition the accusations that he had mirrored Britney’s phone.
In January, Rosengart enlisted former FBI special agent Sherine Ebadi to investigate the newspaper’s reporting, and she corroborated that Jamie had “engaged in and directed others to engage in unconscionable violations of [Britney’s] privacy and civil liberties.”
Ebadi, who was on former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team investigating Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, said in a declaration obtained by Page Six at the time that said she had “personally debriefed and interviewed” Vlasov and found him to be a “highly credible” witness.
As recently as this week, Britney and Jamie’s attorneys have accused each other’s clients of dodging requests to sit for depositions regarding the conservatorship, which controlled the “Toxic” singer’s life and money for nearly 14 years prior to its termination in November 2021.
Jamie’s lawyer, Alex Weingarten, argued that Britney’s “incendiary allegations” about her dad on social media warranted a sworn testimony, while Rosengart noted that the Grammy winner had been “kept in the dark for more than a decade” and cannot wholly speak to how Jamie ran her conservatorship prior to his suspension in September 2021.
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