Alli Sims has not spoken to her cousin Britney Spears since she said Spears’ father threatened her more than a decade ago.
In January 2008, while James “Jamie” Spears sought control of his daughter’s business, Sims said he received a call saying something would happen to her if she didn’t stop communicating with the pop icon.
“He was 100 percent threatening me with my life,” said Sims, who left his job working for celebrity event planner Mindy Weiss to move in with Spears as a paid assistant in 2007. “I didn’t let him go. , so I didn’t answer “your calls again.
The tutelage that confined Spears to the control of his father and a handful of lawyers for 13 years is the subject of “Framing Britney Spears”, a documentary by The New York Times that tracks his rise to stardom and the pressure of the media that often comes to blame for its public collapse in 2007.
“How do you watch this documentary and be in it and live in it and say nothing when it has lasted so long?” Sims told NBC News in his first interview in more than a decade.
The ongoing legal battle between Spears and his father led to the resurgence of the #FreeBritney movement, which started on social media and brought awareness to potential civil rights abuses in legal guardianship.
It also elevated the conversation about Spears’ legacy of tabloid fodder to a collective recognition of the public’s complicity in his downfall, which Sims witnessed while living with Spears the year before the guardianship took effect.
Some individuals who were part of Spears’ past while she rose to stardom are now struggling with their own responsibility in the events that contributed to her downfall, which has left her in a legal battle for control of her personal and financial affairs.
In a public apology to Spears and Janet Jackson posted on Instagram on Friday, Spears’ ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake called the entertainment industry a “failure” and acknowledged that he personally “benefited from a system that tolerates misogyny and racism “and is distorted to position privileged white men for success.
“As a man in a privileged position, I have to talk about it,” he wrote in the post after years of remaining silent during Spears’ mental health struggles and harsh treatment.
“Wow,” Sims said on Friday after learning about the post. “You know that everyone makes mistakes and he was not perfect.”
Timberlake once boasted about sleeping with the singer and launched his solo career on an album that put him as a passionate romantic and Spears as a cheater. Evening presenters speared Spears in his monologues.
“Everything falls into her lap and she is to blame for everything not being right,” said Sims.
Even 13 years away from the scenes that take place in the documentary, which she described as “accurate”, Sims said the experience still affects her.
The fear of false statements that Sims endured at the time alongside one of the world’s biggest celebrities also exposed her, she said, to scrutiny and contributed to her hesitation in speaking publicly for so long.
Sims acknowledged how the optics of some situations in which the couple finds themselves may have been perceived, but she said she rejects the narrative that is often disseminated in the media that shames women for enjoying this attention.
“Just because I was smiling in a photo going through a drive-through doesn’t mean I wanted attention,” said Sims. “I would rather be able to drive around town without anyone bothering us.”
Worldly activities, like going to Starbucks for coffee or buying groceries, put Sims in increasingly dangerous situations.
“We were so exposed,” she said.
The extremes that Sims and Spears experienced with media attention often left the pair outnumbered the paparazzi in aggressive pursuits through the streets of Los Angeles or even in Spears’ own backyard, where helicopters were sometimes an accessory to track each Spears’ move, Sims said.
“There are a lot of them,” she said of the paparazzi. “You are completely surrounded by them. You are at their mercy. “
“It definitely affects you. I mean, it affects me and it’s been 13 years. “
Sims had some of the most traumatic scenes alongside Spears, including the night of 2007 that arguably produced some of the singer’s most indelible images of hitting a paparazzo’s vehicle with an umbrella handle.
Sims left Hollywood and lives in Louisiana with her husband and 9-year-old daughter.
“We have fun and enjoy life and there is, you know, no real drama,” she said.
“It’s nice and normal.”
Although Sims says she doesn’t miss the day-to-day madness when Spears is chased by the media, she misses their friendship.
“Do I miss her as a person and think about her all the time? Yes, ”she said. “She’s still all over the place. You can’t help but think of her every day. “
Sims said he did not know what to do to help Spears in the run up to conservatism. In January 2008, when Spears underwent two involuntary psychiatric attacks, Sims said that Spears sometimes reached her using random people’s phones when hers was taken to ask for help.
“The situation was way beyond my head at the time and your father and others were involved,” she said.
“I really believe that (Jamie) would have done something if I didn’t withdraw from the situation,” said Sims.
Jamie Spears’ lawyers did not respond to NBC News’s request for comment.
Sims said he carries “a lot of guilt”, adding that he received several calls from his cousin who did not answer after Jamie Spears’ alleged threat to stay away.
“I can’t imagine how she felt alone,” she said.
“When I think about how long she had to put up with this and it’s been 13 years, I feel really sad for her. I really hope that one day she will be able to tell her story, if that’s what she wants to do. If she does, get ready, because there’s more to this story than I’m sure anyone could imagine. “