Ben Kothe / BuzzFeed News; Getty Images

“Hi guys, just checking in with all of you who are concerned about me,” Britney Spears said in an Instagram video posted April 23. “My family has been going through a lot of stress and anxiety lately, so I just needed time to deal. But don't worry — I'll be back very soon.”

The video was a response to the #FreeBritney social media campaign that had gathered steam earlier that month, sparked by the Instagram-parsing fan podcast Britney’s Gram. The podcast got a call from a man claiming to be a paralegal with information that Spears was pressured into checking herself into a mental health facility, through the conservatorship she has been under for the last 11 years. The legal arrangement, imposed during a turbulent moment in her life in 2008, gave her father Jamie Spears control over her financial and physical well-being.

“You guys are onto something,” said the anonymous caller in a voicemail, referring to suspicions the podcast hosts, comedians Barbara Gray and Tess Barker, had voiced in a previous episode about Spears’ sudden absence from Instagram. The paralegal explained that he had worked for a lawyer involved with the conservatorship, which Gray and Barker said they’d confirmed. “What is happening is disturbing, to say the least,” the caller said. “From what I understand this was not a decision she made at all.” Gray and Barker were convinced that this apparent insider information was credible — and that it needed to be shared with the world. “As it stands, there are a lot of people who make money because of the money that Britney makes. It would be in their favor to control that money in a certain way,” Gray told BuzzFeed News. “There’s a culture of fear that has kept a lot of people from speaking out about this particular situation.”

“There are a lot of people who make money because of the money that Britney makes.”

Brenda Chase / Getty Images Spears performing in 1999.

America met Britney Spears in the late ’90s as a sweet Southern girl performing erotically tinged innocence. Her first hit, “...Baby One More Time” — featuring that titillating baby voice — sold a distinct style of coy schoolgirl sexiness, which was on full display in the blockbuster music video. That persona was cemented with a now-iconic 1999 Rolling Stone cover story, with a teen queen fantasy photo spread, shot by David LaChapelle, that upped the ante on the video by featuring Spears in her childhood bedroom, wearing only her underwear.

It all seemed designed for a creepy, Lolita-craving male gaze that Spears, at just 16, couldn’t possibly understand it would appeal to — or so the media furor sparked by the photos suggested. People magazine, the “minivan majority” bible, raised concerns about America’s pigtailed purveyor of Christian purity and wondered if she was Too Sexy Too Soon? All the hand-wringing was predicated on the idea — prevalent once again with #FreeBritney — that Spears needed to be protected from herself, her management, or both. Yet she took credit for the sexy imagery. “I had this idea where we’re in school and bored out of our minds, and we have Catholic uniforms on,” she explained to Rolling Stone about the “Baby” video. “And I said, ‘Why don’t we have knee-highs and tie the shirts up to give it a little attitude?’ — so it wouldn’t be boring and cheesy.”

Rolling Stone

The juxtaposition of sex with white-teen sweetness was catnip for the press, which loved to highlight any behind-the-scenes transgressions that conflicted with the seemingly manufactured innocence of the Spears persona. That same year, for instance, breast implant rumors prompted late-night gags about teenage Britney’s denials. (“She did say, though, that she was putting a dollar away for the boob fairy,” joked Conan O’Brien.) But all the speculation only fueled the growth of the Britney phenomenon, arguably because of the fact that Spears neither talked back to the press nor unapologetically owned the ambiguities of her image. Instead, she framed her teen pop star persona as playing dress-up. “I’m not going to walk around in hot pants and a bra on the street,” she told People, “but when you’re an artist you sometimes play a part.” In a 2000 essay analyzing the appeal of early Britney, memoirist Elizabeth Wurtzel tried to figure out what was so captivating about the pop sensation: “Is it Britney Spears herself, or the way she seems not to get it? Or is it the wink-wink way in which she appears to be a complete constructor of her own sexiness, feigning innocence?” Wurtzel ended by noting that in the novel Lolita, the prepubescent protagonist “did not age very well; awareness destroyed her.” She wondered, “How long can Britney Spears linger in paradise before all of us notice that her eyes were wide shut all along?”

Kevin Winter / Getty Images Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake at the premiere of Crossroads, 2002.

Spears’ transition into adulthood was, indeed, rocky. Her music alluded to some of the confusion of her emerging womanhood through generic songs like “Overprotected” and “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” which served as the theme song of Crossroads, the 2002 road trip coming-of-age dramedy (written by Shonda Rhimes) she starred in. But the biggest and most compelling Britney story was, increasingly, offstage.

Britney's love life quickly became fuel for a slut-shaming tabloid industry that delighted in trying to expose her proclamations of innocence as totally manufactured. After she’d discussed remaining a virgin until marriage in teen magazines, for instance, Justin Timberlake revealed they had had sex and then made a whole song and video about how she cheated on him. Fred Durst famously talked to Howard Stern about having sex with her. Spears herself got in on the naughtiness by famously kissing Madonna at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards, years before that kind of queer-baiting became commonplace. Yet she still used the same strategy of feigning ignorance when asked about any of her supposedly scandalous actions, or about reports of her cocaine consumption and partying. Amid rumors that the Madonna kiss would lead to a more risqué image for her fourth album, 2003’s In the Zone, she told Rolling Stone: “I’m not gonna come out on this record and show my crotch or anything.” In the Zone became Spears’ fourth consecutive No. 1 album, breaking records for women artists. But, while her first two albums went diamond, with over 10 million units sold, each of the second two sold less than half of that. The album’s biggest radio hit was “Toxic,” but it is arguably most famous (or memorable for fans) thanks to the song “Everytime,” which Britney wrote herself. “Everytime” is a delicate and haunting ballad that was widely speculated to be a response to Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River.” In the video, featuring Britney and a Justin lookalike fighting and getting harassed by paparazzi, Britney’s character kills herself and is seemingly reborn as a baby. Watching the video now, there’s an added layer of symbolism — as if on some level Spears understood that growing up in the Britney brand might be an impossible project, and the only narrative possibility was death and reborn innocence. Not incidentally, that was the last album era in which fans had access to the Britney Spears phenomenon as they had once known it — with the star herself giving in-depth interviews as she sold her brand of “not that innocent.”

Youtube In the video for "Everytime," Britney's character appears to be reborn as a baby.

Years before #FreeBritney emerged, fans were already hoping for, and imagining, a rawer Britney liberated from the music industry machine they believed was holding her back. And Spears herself stoked those fantasies. In 2004, she showed up in person at a radio station to unveil a new single, “Mona Lisa,” which she said was going to be part of an album she wanted to call Original Doll, alluding to the banality of her Barbie aesthetic. “They want her to break down / Be a legend of her fall,” proclaim the lyrics of the song, which speak to the public fascination with tabloid train wrecks.

The idea of that Original Doll album, which was never released, became an early fantasy of a freer, more woke Britney. She’d supposedly written songs about same-sex marriage and her own experiences. And it does seem, in retrospect, like she was coming into her own professionally and personally and trying to set boundaries. Her surprise Vegas wedding to a childhood friend in January 2004 seems, now, like a rebellious act against management overworking her. (“I was on the road for a while, and whoever scheduled my tour must have been out of their mind,” she said later in an episode of her 2005 reality show, Britney and Kevin: Chaotic. “I was doing way too much stuff. I was over it.”) She married Kevin Federline later the same year and started using her official website to communicate directly to her fans and the media. "I've actually learned to say 'NO!'” she wrote in a blog post. “With this newly found freedom, its like people don't know how to act around me. Should we talk to her like we did when she was 16 or like the Icon everyone says she is? My prerogative right now is to just chill & let all of the other overexposed blondes on the cover of Us Weekly be your entertainment… GOOD LUCK GIRLS!!" But as the aughts rolled on, fans instead watched as the supposedly manufactured Britney came apart in the rawest way. Her divorce and child custody disputes with Federline in 2006 turned her into sensational content for the tabloid mill yet again, but this time she was less as an object of fascination than a tragic, pitiful story. Once the pinnacle of young Southern sweetness, she was now depicted as white trash and an irresponsible, baby-dropping mother. The shift from “good” to “bad” Britney almost single-handedly kept the gossip industrial complex churning for years. (“We serialize Britney Spears. She’s our President Bush,” TMZ titan Harvey Levin said at the time.) And the media’s obsession with her went into overdrive when the ultimate “overexposed blonde” rebelled against all the contradictory fantasies projected onto her, shaving off her sex symbol tresses and angrily pointing her umbrella at paparazzi in February 2007. If that was meant to be a plea for privacy, it didn’t work; that Spears’ polished pop star image was unraveling — seemingly outside of her control — only made her more relevant than ever.

Spears had become the object rather than the subject of her own story.

Kevin Winter / Getty Images Spears performs at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2007.

It wasn’t until MTV aired the carefully curated comeback documentary Britney: For the Record in November 2008 that Spears briefly addressed what she was thinking during the “bad” Britney era. “People shave their heads all the time. I was going through a lot,” she said. “But it was just me feeling a form of a little bit of rebellion, or feeling free, or shedding stuff that had happened.”

Now endlessly parsed by fans, For the Record is neither an old-school, cathartic Oprah tell-all nor an intimate Demi Lovato–style YouTube doc. Instead, it follows Britney as she prepared to promote her next album, Circus, with occasional allusions to her “bad” years and sobering references to her everyday reality. In the documentary, her father expounds on his wider philosophy regarding his daughter: “The best thing for her is what she’s doing right now. She’s in her element. She’s in her world, keeping her busy. Like me, I like to go fishing; she likes to sing and dance. She likes to work.” But Spears herself dreamily talks about marrying a hypothetical man of her dreams and having more babies. She chafes against her father trying to take her phone away from her and calls him an “asshole.” At one point she gets emotional, complaining that Team Britney doesn’t listen to her. “When I tell them the way I feel, it’s like they hear me but they’re really not listening. They’re hearing what they want to hear,” she says, getting increasingly emotional. “They’re not really listening to what I’m telling them, it’s like...it’s bad.” (A letter that she purportedly wrote at the time echoing these sentiments were recently uncovered by tabloids.)

“If I wasn’t under the restraints I’m under right now,” she says in an oft-cited moment where she directly addresses the conservatorship, “you know, with the lawyers and doctors and people analyzing me every day and all that kind of stuff — like, if that wasn’t there, I’d feel so liberated and feel like myself.” Ultimately, the special raised more questions than it answered. There were no direct references to her parents or Lutfi, or any deeper explanation of what led to the events of 2007 and 2008. It seemed that Team Britney — and Spears herself — simply wanted everyone to move on and focus on the music, without giving fans access to what they really wanted: Britney telling her full story on her own terms.

Kevin Winter / Getty Images Spears performing in 2016.

Since 2008, when Spears engages with the press and the public — whether promoting a new residency or a fashion line — it’s been through tightly choreographed outings, with preapproved questions that are all business. In 2016, a much-debated New York Times article finally asked, “Is Britney Spears Ready to Stand on Her Own?” The report gave the first real behind-the-scenes information about what Spears’ life is actually like under the conservatorship, including the fact that even her significant purchases must be approved by her father. It’s in many ways the only window into her backstage life that her fans have ever gotten. But the yearslong information vacuum around Spears hasn’t stopped fans from speculating about her and crafting their own narratives and theories out of what they’ve been able to find. And the rise of social media and podcasts has given them new material and platforms to share their findings. One Instagram account, @britneyspearschronology, is devoted to parsing a seemingly endless archive of pictures of Spears from 2007 to 2008. In the comments, fans debate the meaning of photos where she appears with her children, where she smokes, where she seems happy, where she looks sad. The hosts of the podcast Eat, Pray, Britney, self-described “Britney historians,” revisit her life and career through the lens of the events of the 2007–2008 era. They pore over press accounts and legal documents like pop culture detectives. For instance, they describe the 2004 quickie Vegas wedding (and equally quick annulment) as “the first time that we hear on the record that Britney’s team is sort of utilizing her faculties as a means to intervene in a legal matter.” They also raise questions about the different interests of Spears’ management, her parents, Lutfi, and how these all play out in the press. (TMZ, they claim, has been especially sympathetic to the narrative of Spears’ father as her savior.) There have also been more lighthearted projects. One 2015 episode of the podcast Mystery Show was dedicated to the question of whether Spears had ever read the unheralded novel To Feel Stuff, something the author wondered after she saw a photo of Spears carrying the book. (The answer, procured after host Starlee Kine purchased a fan meet and greet, is that Spears read it and loved it.) Another podcast, It’s Britney, Bitch, is hosted by two longtime Spears stans who debate all the merits of her different musical eras and albums. And Gray and Barker initially started Britney’s Gram — which would eventually spark the #FreeBritney uproar — because they were delighted by Britney’s Instagram presence, chock-full of inspirational quotes and pictures with her children. “We would have fun with it, because she seemed like she was having fun a lot of the time,” Gray told me. “But then sometimes there were cryptic things that she would post that would seem to make sense coming from someone who was very controlled and didn’t have as much freedom as you would hope.”

The yearslong information vacuum around Spears hasn’t stopped fans from speculating about her.