* (UNEASY TONE) Whether you're a child star or whether you're in your twenties or thirties, when fame visits you with its magnifying aspect, immediate caricature gets built up. It's not really you. And if you haven't got a strong sense of self, you're asking someone to try and find who they are in the middle of a tornado. Two all-American stars ` the fresh-faced actress who had Hollywood at her command; and the back-country girl who became the best-selling teenage artist of all time. Lindsay's appeal was that she was almost an every girl. She had this strength behind her character. Britney Spears ` an innocent girl from the middle of nowhere, plucked to stardom, living the dream. People love her spirit. Both stars rocket to fame. And just as spectacularly, both crash and burn. The gun was loaded by her having a pretty complicated childhood. So if I intentionally sabotage my life, at least I'm in control of it. Unprofessional, unpredictable and unapologetic, Lindsay Lohan became uninsurable, which in Hollywood means unemployable. She was Hollywood's biggest train wreck. The demons got the best of her in her meteoric rise, and in the end she succumbed to them. Britney Spears suffered a total career collapse that destroyed not only an image but a person. When people are over-controlled, somebody can only handle that for so long. Which ends with somebody getting arrested and crying and under the influence. They ruled screen and stage, but their copycat tabloid troubles wrecked both their careers. Lindsay's surrounded by people who like to party. I mean, thank God Britney Spears got out of it. Each carrying their own baggage down different roads to fame, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears would cross party paths and ultimately end up at the same dead end. The road to fame and fortune is paved with influences good and bad. Find out what leads some stars to fall... under the influence. Copyright Able 2018. Growing up in Long Island, Lindsay Lohan loved to be in front of the camera. She started her career as a child model at age 3. By age 11, in 1998, she landed her first starring role in Disney's 'The Parent Trap'. The Parent Trap earned $92 million worldwide, and that solidified Lindsay being able to open a film and launched her career, essentially. Disney put the money to the mouse ears and signed the pre-teen starlet to a three-picture deal. Lindsay Lohan's next film with Jamie Lee Curtis, Freaky Friday, it grosses $160-plus million. So to take a girl who was this cute little girl, Lindsay Lohan, and watch her evolve into her teenage years and go through phases, it's fascinating. But it was Lindsay's appearance in Tina Fey's debut screenplay, Mean Girls, in 2004 that sent her star into the stratosphere. Hollywood really believed that she was the next big 'it' girl. But when it comes to Lindsay Lohan, what comes up must come down. It all started spiralling out of control. Lindsay Lohan was in and out of court just as much as she was in and out of nightclubs. I think Lindsay started to unravel around her early twenties. The media intensity and pressure on her was just way too high. You gotta give it to her. She was Hollywood's biggest disaster. Barely into her twenties, Lindsay hit rock bottom ` personally and professionally. How did this star burn out so soon? The influence she was under seemed to have started at home. Dina and Michael Lohan are an interesting couple. They met at a bar and then quickly after at a young age got married, started a family. He came from a family of money; was a trader on Wall Street. Dina and Michael Lohan had a very volatile relationship, and it's alleged that Lindsay witnessed domestic violence in the home. As a child, Lindsay was powerless to the dysfunction that was going on at home with her mom and dad. Her father was in and out of her life. For a child, this is really scary, traumatic and can be chaotic. In the early '90s, Lindsay's father was convicted of insider trading and contempt of court. Michael Lohan was sentenced to three years in jail. Amidst all the dysfunction that was happening in her own family, I'm pretty sure that the movie sets offered her a positive place to be where she felt valued and comfortable in as well. I think that when Lindsay's father was incarcerated and she started her career, it was probably a very quiet time in the household; there was no fighting. So when her father does come back after being incarcerated for three full years, I'm sure she didn't trust that he wouldn't go again. In this time, Lindsay's father is crashing his car; assault and battery; DUIs. I mean, he's gonna land himself back in jail again. In 1997, Michael Lohan is arrested on parole violations and sent to jail for another year. Again, an example for Lindsay to feel that when things are good, it doesn't last. Her father has fairly publicly said that he's had a problem with cocaine and alcohol, which means that 50% of her DNA was predisposing her to having a substance abuse disorder. If you can't even trust your own father, who else can you trust? No one, which is why she went in search of other people, other things, other places, and all of them collapsed around her, one by one. At the end of 2005, Lindsay's parents separate. But by then, Lindsay had her own legal problems to deal with. Lindsay Lohan's personal life and professional life were on a collision course. The Lohan family drama was no longer exclusive to Mom and Dad. Lindsay was now earning her own bad reputation. At the height of her success, all of a sudden we start to see a different side of Lindsay. Visibly, she's gotten thinner. She starts to look a bit tired for a girl her age. Every night, we see her out with Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. The way she's acting in her social life, it's gonna cause her more problems in her career than is necessary. She struggled throughout her early twenties to really get a grip of the media attention. (CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICK) I worked with Lindsay at the height of it all. She had to make an appearance at a nightclub which we were paying her for. And at the time, her girlfriend Sam Ronson was DJing. So, in the contract, Lindsay was supposed to show up at about 11 o'clock and leave at 1 o'clock at the morning. The line outside the nightclub was around the building. 11 o'clock, no Lindsay. 11.30, no Lindsay. 12 o'clock, Sam, her girlfriend, is there. She goes on and deejays. I go up to Sam and I was like, 'Where's Lindsay?' She doesn't know. 'What? You're her girlfriend.' 12.30 ` no Lindsay. 1 o'clock ` no Lindsay Lohan. At 1.24, security messages me to come to the front because Lindsay finally shows up. She is wasted. Everyone's going nuts. First, everyone was angry cos she wasn't showing up. Then she does show up and now she's wasted. She comes into a VIP area, I sit her down. She decides that she doesn't wanna look at anybody. Lindsay wanted me to turn the couch to have her back to all the crowd. She sits down. She lights a menthol cigarette in the club ` there's no smoking allowed in the club! Maybe 10 minutes max, she decides that she's done and she wants to go now, so I have to escort her out, no questions asked. Away she goes. Bye, Lindsay. I think we paid her $25,000 to show up for 10 minutes to put her back to the crowd, light a cigarette and then leave. In July 2006, Lindsay was being paid a reported $7.5 million to star alongside Jane Fonda and Felicity Huffman in 'Georgia Rule'. After a few onset incidents, the whole shoot was delayed because Lindsay was reportedly hospitalised for exhaustion and dehydration. But the studio wasn't buying it. Amidst the height of her career, she's not showing up to work. James G Robinson, the head of production, posts a very public letter to Lindsay Lohan for the real reasons why the film's not being made. It's really hard to wrap your head around the belief that here, this young girl is getting paid $7.5 million to be in a film with Jane Fonda and has the audacity to not even show up to set on time and have no problem with being photographed the night before into the wee hours of the morning partying. Not only is it disrespectful, but it's also a slap in the face of anybody in Hollywood who's backing Lindsay at that time. Anybody who's actively using and working from that space under the influence is not making decisions about, 'Is this the direction I wanna be going?' It may not be fair to say that this is a choice she's making, but certainly no one else can do it for her. The biggest problem she had, what really stunted her career, was that nobody would insure her. She was a liability. She was drinking, doing drugs; running around; lesbian, straight; car crashes. It was madness! By 2007, it's evident that things are off track for Lindsay Lohan, and we see her entering rehab, although a lot of people think that this is a PR stunt. You have to make the assumption that any time a celebrity does anything, potentially, but not always, it's a PR stunt or they're trying to show something. So when Lindsay goes to rehab for one day, I don't really know anyone that goes to rehab for one day and cleans up. So the assumption ` assumption ` would be that she wants photographers to take pictures of her going into rehab and leaving rehab so that the headline can be 'Lindsay Went To Rehab', and so she can get insured again and carry on with her career. Lindsay may have wanted the assumption to be that she was correcting her bad habits. But just a few weeks after checking out of her first rehab, an incriminating video surfaces. * Bad influences can be the undoing of the most radiant star. Lindsay Lohan's father was in and out of her life, something a young Britney Spears knew all about. Both of these little girls faced a road to stardom that lacked protection and guidance, a road that leads to trouble. So there's footage that appears of Lindsay Lohan at the Roosevelt Hotel doing lines of cocaine, which was allegedly leaked by a friend. And I think that really speaks to the kind of people that Lindsay is surrounding herself at this point of her life. Lindsay was just behaving that way because she was at the height of her fame. I mean, this was when Lindsay was big. I think that Lindsay's behaviour is the definition of reckless. Reckless basically means that you do something without thinking of the consequences. Like, 'I don't care what happens to me. I don't care what happens to others.' So I do wonder, um, from an emotional standpoint what was going on with Lindsay during this time where she's just kept doing the same behaviour, hurting herself and others and not stopping. The problem is the intensity of all the cameras watching you. Cameras these days take 15 photos a second. You only have to blink once wrong in the wrong direction and you pull a face like... And everyone thinks you're drunk or high. That depresses you even if that wasn't the case, and then you go and get drunk, and the pictures become worse, and it's like a downwards spiral that never stops. What happens next over a couple of Hollywood nights drags out into years of court appearances, treatment stays and probation. A May 2007 car crash in Beverley Hills is the start of Lindsay's legal troubles. This was during the period of time where she was struggling to keep herself together. And this is all a part of the Hollywood lifestyle, being young, beautiful, rich, famous, fast cars, late at night. It's a terrible combination. In May of 2007, Lindsay was arrested for the first time and charged with DUI. Cocaine was also found in her possession. She returned to rehab for a 45-day stay and wore an ankle monitoring bracelet. I think at the time when Lindsay gets the alcohol monitoring bracelet, it's fair to say that her vocation as an actor is pretty much dwarfed by her vocation as a celebrity. It gets to the point that Lindsay is known for being infamously infamous. In a way, what is motivating her to be better and do better when behaving badly is keeping her famous? Many people don't wanna get sober because they feel like life is now gonna be one long church picnic and not who they really are. That July, Lindsay was arrested again, this time on charges of drunk driving, cocaine possession, and driving with a suspended licence. If you have one DUI, it may just be bad luck or bad judgement or you weren't thinking. If you have two DUIs, that's about 90% predictive that you have an alcohol problem. So if things aren't bad enough, Lindsay gets arrested for chasing who she thinks is her assistant in Hollywood, only to find out that it was her assistant's mother at the time. There's no question this is bottom-of-the-barrel antics. If you're under the influence of an active addiction, you're not making choices like, 'Wow, that was a bad idea. I better cut that out.' There's a compulsion about it. This is not a person who is in a position to learn from that. Lindsay's career at this point, you almost feel sorry for her, because ultimately she's being handed this golden egg she just doesn't value that she seems to drop. And whatever personal demons she's bringing to the table, they're distracting her from doing what I'm sure, deep down inside back then, she's very passionate about. My patients would never be able to punt their DUI around in the court system for 10 years. They would just be going to jail, and then they would be unemployable. The sad part about this is Lindsay walked away from a career that could last her her whole life, and she succumbed to being a victim of instant celebrity. From 2007 to 2013, Lindsay appears in court 20 times before four judges. She's found to be in violation of her probation four times and sentenced to six months in jail. During the 20 court appearances or so that Lindsay had at that time, every day we would line up, and we would all have the same lenses on, doing the same thing, waiting for Lindsay just to walk towards us and give us the picture of what she was wearing to court that day. It was almost like a fashion show. (DRAMATIC MUSIC) I don't think for one second Lindsay had a problem just rocking up and doing what she does best, which is looking great, wearing great clothes and making a media mess of what was going on. She creates her own drama, her own chaos, because that's really all she knows. Lindsay was just behaving that way because she was at the height of her fame. This is when Lindsay was big. With Lindsay in and out of court, she finds herself repeating the mistakes of her father. Like Michael, her substance abuse problems result in a rotating door of court appearances. The chaos and drama of her family home is now reflected in her celebrity life, and she seems to relish the attention. During this time, we see that Lindsay is incredibly defiant. Defiance for her is power; it's like this power struggle. 'You can't tell me what to do,' and you see this. This is why she is showing up in court again and again. Again, she's the one that has all the influence and power. Throughout 2007, Lindsay checks herself in and out of five rehab facilities for a total of 250 days. Her critics question whether she is really trying to get better. To be able to go into a rehab clinic and check out whenever you like doesn't sound like a commitment to trying to find recovery. She's given what some people dream of and intentionally ruins it. That's not normal human behaviour; that's dysfunctional human behaviour, somebody who is coming from purely baggage and unresolved issues. Even though Lindsay's acting career has stalled, she's still making news every day. What would motivate her to behave better when behaving badly is keeping her famous? I think somebody who is in Lindsay Lohan's position would need to find something she really connects with that it may be worth it to change. This is a time where you can be a celebrity for having no job. Lindsay Lohan completely killed her acting career to focus solely on being a full-time celebrity. Who's around to help? Who's in Lindsay's corner and who isn't? Lindsay's surrounded by people who like to party. * In looking at the influences some celebrities are under, we can better understand why their lives can take such wild turns. Lindsay Lohan's career was wrecked by the same tabloid tornado that would also trap Britney Spears. Lindsay has often admitted to needing a lot of people and chaos around her. Throughout these years of overindulgence and scandal, Lindsay is surrounded by drama. When it comes to Lindsay, if you think about it, scandal is her currency now that her acting career has dried up. Lindsay admits to Oprah Winfrey that she's addicted to the chaos and the attention, and this is what we're seeing right now, is the result of an addict who needs that constant fix. If you look at her adult life, stability feels uncomfortable, and so she replays it again and again where she creates her own drama, she creates her own chaos, because, really, that's all she knows. The entire Lohan family seems to thrive on chaos and drama. Michael and Dina surrounded their daughter at this time, but may have questionable motives. Lindsay's parents constantly wanted the attention on themselves as well. So her father would constantly do interviews when she was in court. Her mother would always sell stories and phone things into newspapers and magazines. They were as media hungry as Lindsay was. Lindsay's parents aren't the only influence in her life that craves media attention. She surrounds herself with a Hollywood in-crowd that also loves the drama. The hardest thing for a celebrity is to pick your inner circle. You can't trust anyone around you. In Lindsay's case, you can't even trust your own parents. So, to find people that don't want you for fame or money is incredibly difficult. Young Hollywood celebrities tend to lean towards rich friends that don't want them for money, don't need the media attention ` their parents are famous. The problem is that they're rich and bored, and that's a terrible combination. We see the birth of the term 'frenemy'. It's the people that you depend on to create the 'cool factor', but ultimately you're competing with one another at the same time. So there's this superficial friendship that exists, so Lindsay Lohan's frenemies at the time are Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Nicole Ritchie and Brandon Davis. They're partying, and it's this totally different lifestyle that I don't think she needed. Lindsay is now more famous for her exploits with this crowd than she is for her spiralling career. And I think for the most part, those inner circle friends tend to be fairly negative influences, because they're not producing anything. They don't have jobs. They don't have normal relationships. They just have money, and they fly around the world doing whatever they want. Throughout all her court appearances and the drama supporting her headline-making frenemies, in 2008, Lindsay starts a relationship with DJ Samantha Ronson, a British socialite in with the Hollywood crowd. What was that Sam Ronson thing all about? I guess she was just so different to everything else in Lindsay's life. Instead of all these, like, hunky guys who were trying to sleep with Lindsay Lohan, she was like, 'You know what, I'mma show all of you. I'm gonna swing the other way.' She's just feeding the drama. As long as she's in the limelight, she feels like she matters. The whole thing didn't make any sense. It didn't last very long. Lindsay went on to the next thing to try and make her happy. Lindsay Lohan's mother, Dina, is seen spending more time clubbing and partying with her daughter than doing any sort of managing or parenting. And my take on her out partying with her mom, it just felt inappropriate. To do a public display of you and your daughter 'out on the razz', I just thought was in bad taste. I can imagine for Lindsay, it was very difficult to take her mom seriously when one day she's trying to parent you and the next day she's partying with you and being reckless. So number one, very confusing, but as a child will always want to feel love from their parent, and they will take it. If it means partying, then I will take that love. Lindsay needs stability and guidance more than anything else, yet Dina seems less concerned about being a parent and more interested in sharing her daughter's spotlight, not unlike Lindsay's frenemies. The people that I treat, the moms and the significant others are the hardest to just get out of the way. And explaining, 'This is what support looks like. This is what helping their problem looks like.' I want you to enable their recovery, not to enable their addiction. At the time where Lindsay was going through all of these ups and downs, there wasn't really anyone taking control. Her mom and dad occasionally tried to step in, but would soon lose trust very quickly by trying to sell her on to something else to make money. She really didn't have a tight unit of people that were looking out for her. She was kinda just young and running wild with a very, very big bank balance. Lindsay Lohan's once promising career was now in shambles. Between 2009 and 2013, she stars in a series of box office flops. Despite the mess in her life, Lindsay has people that want to believe in her. In 2014, Oprah pays Lindsay $2 million to star in a reality series about her life. There was hope behind Oprah. Like everything else, she just lit it up like a ball of flames and walked away, and when Oprah offers to help you and you can't take that help, that's tough. When somebody has had a long-term struggle with substance use disorder, there's a lot of collateral damage along the way, and it's not always possible to repair all of those. I don't know if she's had a lot of positive experiences in her life in general. It seems like she went from one kind of life that was stressful and upsetting to another kind of stressful and upsetting life. By 2015, it seems as though Lindsay Lohan has begun to turn her life around. We see that Lindsay gets a bit of a break. You know, she's finally over a decade of struggles with the courts and probations over her two DUIs. She's moved to London. She's igniting a new theatre career. Possibly focus on her healing. Almost like a bit of a retreat from the world and all of the bad influences from Hollywood. And there's a sense of hope behind Lindsay at this point. I really genuinely believe that Lindsay is a cool chick. All of the, you know, bracelets to do with alcohol and the rehabs and the smashing up cars, that's no different else who lives in Hollywood. She just has a lot, a lot of media attention thrown in her face 24/7. And if you gave that to anyone, they would struggle to keep it together. Lindsay's troubled childhood and dysfunctional family means her chances of following in their footsteps is high. She struggles with drugs and alcohol and is mixing with a crowd as addicted to drama as she is. Lindsay seems to have left this behind, but will she stay on track? Lindsay's downfall is rivalled by only one other star. Britney Spears also started her ascent to fame as a child, and like Lindsay, she encountered many enablers and bad influencers along the way. A back-country gal from the Bible Belt, Britney Spears knew from the start she was destined to perform. Britney was this gorgeous girl next-door from Louisiana that was polished. She was like a little doll. Every girl wanted to be Britney. Every guy wanted to date Britney. From pageants to talent shows to the Mickey Mouse Club, Britney spent her childhood on stage. But by the time she was 17, she was the most famous teenage girl in the world. She's this teen sensation who was now becoming, whether she likes it or not, a role model for everybody. By 2007, the polished pop princess had lost her shine, and she became more famous for her outrageous exploits than her musical talents. She was under immense scrutiny, and with that scrutiny comes an immense pressure. But no one was prepared for what was to come. One minute she'd be calm. The next minute, she was screaming. It was like she was going down, and she was going down fast. Her life, her family, her career, it was all in jeopardy. It had reached fever pitch. It was just too much, all day, all night, and I think she just cracked. People around her were trying to manage this chaos. I just don't think they had the experience to do it. How did the pop princess who seemed to have everything end up almost losing it all? To find out, we need to return to the beginning. Britney Spears and her parents are country folk in Kentwood, Louisiana, a town of 2200 people. Saying you wanna be a pop star is like saying, 'I wanna be an astronaut.' I think to understand Britney's childhood, you first have to understand where her parents, Jamie and Lynne Spears, came from. I think they had a very tumultuous marriage, and that spilled over into the family home. Jamie drank heavily. Britney was often telling her parents to stop fighting. Meanwhile, Britney would escape it by going into her bedroom, taking a hairbrush and singing her songs. She realised that the fighting would stop. Her mom would become proud. Her dad would stop shouting. I think that's probably where she started to learn to be a performer, by finding refuge away from the emotional chaos in her home. Lynne Spears takes a keen interest in her daughter's talents. Lynne took her on the pageants, took her to auditions and was really getting behind her. At a young age for Britney, pushing her into competitions and these talent shows, it really teaches her to be competitive, to be the best, to be perfectionistic, to compare myself to other people. She wasn't learning more deeper skills about 'who am I? My self-worth. My values.' She was focused on 'my appearance, my self-image' and those more superficial things. Jamie Spears believed in his daughter just as much as Lynne Spears did. He had his own issues to deal with. Jamie Spears' mum in 1966 committed suicide, and that, I think, was a big source of pain for him. Now, in Kentwood, you don't go to therapy; you get on with it, bury it deep and drink. I think he tried to be the best dad he could be while competing with all that at the same time. When it comes to Britney in her adulthood, we see her turning to men to save her, to fix her problems, which connects to her relationship with her father, who is most of the time unavailable. Which just feeds this sense of loneliness and in the end recklessness. Britney is believed to call out her parents as being responsible for her eventual downfall in this poem that she penned and posted to her website in 2006. If only her parents knew what was to come. * One bad influence can lead to the next. Britney's chaotic home life set the stage for what was to come, and it was something no one could've predicted. Britney was the first one in the family to be groomed for stardom. Her little sister Jamie Lynn would later be pushed by her parents down the same path. Meanwhile, Lynne pulls Britney out of school in the ninth grade to further her quest for fame. I don't think Lynne Spears was making a square peg for a round hole. That wasn't pushy. That's belief. I'm not sure at that young age she had the emotional maturity, Britney, to know what she was signing up for. Lynne Spears sends Britney's audition tapes to different artist management companies. And another tape landed with Larry Rudolph. He was an entertainment lawyer and a business guy. Something flicked on within him. There wasn't anything like her around at the time. She had the looks. She had the voice. In 1997, Britney signs a deal with Jive Records. The truth is that other record labels didn't see what Jive Records saw. Britney Spears' debut album, Baby One More Time, entered the charts at number one. It eventually would sell over 30 million copies, making Britney the youngest female artist to ever achieve that. Here, we kinda saw her as just being this sweet, little innocent kid, and then all of a sudden, it's just like, boom, wild, little, sexy teenager. From the moment Baby One More Time hit MTV and the moment it started hitting the radios, it was meteoric. It was unprecedented. It was historic. I feel that's part of the phenomenon of Britney Spears, because it happened so fast, so quick that her fame was a phenomenon in itself. Britney's unique brand of pop was equal parts sugar and sex. Britney may have been the head of the pop pack, but she was first and foremost a brand. And that's what the next generation of artists really became. They were branded. They touched a chocolate bar, 'Hey, we gotta make sure there's money off of that.' If they drank a drink, 'Hey, we gotta get some money off of that.' It was very much seeing a product. Big success is happening, and you started out as a Mouseketeer, right? Right, I was on the Mickey Mouse Club, and that was done in Florida, on the Disney Channel, and it was a lot of fun. Interviewing Britney, it was almost like, um, it was like cookie-cutter. You would ask them a question, and they'd just, you know, kinda hit me back with an answer she just probably gave, you know, 20 other people before. You wanna get more from it, but at the same time, you understand the machine of it. Brands don't get tired. Brands don't get ill. So that amount of pressure to be superhuman, of course, eventually they're gonna wear down. Britney suddenly had the fame she and her parents had always wanted, but with it came the pressure of heading up Britney the business. Britney from Mickey Mouse Club days onwards has to be a certain way, act a certain way. I don't know how anybody in that position can ever develop a healthy sense of self and feel connected to themselves as opposed to more connected to the persona that's been crafted for them. I don't think you can prepare for that level of success. It's one thing to be popular in your state. One thing is, you know, popular in your country. When you travel to the rest of the world, and everybody knows who you are, how do you deal with that? Britney was packaged and marketed as innocent yet teasing at the same time. But due to her lack of sophistication, education and with parents who seemingly allowed this hyper sexualisation, Britney was headed down a dark path. Britney lived in a world where everybody was making decisions for her, and then you see moments where she wants to be free and spontaneous and rebel. I think that's human behaviour. If you hold something down for so long, as a result, it's gonna naturally wanna push back up against you. Fame and stardom is all she knows, but she finds someone who understands that world just as much as she does. In a match made in pop heaven, Britney starts dating Justin Timberlake, and true to their teen idol image, both stars say they're abstaining from sex. There was a famous time when Britney Spears was involved with a Rolling Stone front cover on the bed lying with a Tellytubby. That was the sort of start of the controversy, where the churches started speaking out and columnists started speaking out about the dangerous precedent of sexualising teenagers, what this meant for our society, and the scrutiny was on Britney, but I don't think anybody at the record label was complaining. Her videos becoming more provocative. Yes, because they're hitting up now, and they're not just hitting teenagers. They're hitting adult men. To me, I found that, you know, everything from there became even more calculated. It turns out that Britney Spears was not that innocent after all. In a major scandal for the time, in 2002 Britney and Justin break up amid rumours that she cheated on him. I think the break-up with Justin had a huge impact. She kinda went from being rational to very impulsive. And you gotta look at her choices of men thereafter. They weren't Justin Timberlake. In 2003, at the age of just 22, Britney has a wild night in Vegas and marries her childhood friend Jason Alexander. I think this is the beginning of her downward spiral, so her acting recklessly and free, like, 'I am not perfect.' This is the beginning of it. Britney's mother and manager are furious and have the marriage annulled within 55 hours. This scandal is not good for Britney's business. People behind her, pushing her. They all realised what they had to do to keep her in the spotlight, and it wasn't just really truly about pop music. It was about everything else behind the scenes that surrounded that as well. In April 2003, just four months after her Las Vegas wedding, Britney meets Kevin Federline at a night club. He was a good-looking great dancer who was quiet. Everyone else in Britney's life was like, 'Blah, blah, blah.' 'Can you buy me this? Can you do this? Can you come with me here? 'Can you sign that. Can you put me in your music video?' And Kevin was very quiet and cute. Britney said it was love at first sight. He said the same thing. In September 2004, Britney Spears marries Kevin Federline. And I think he was a big influence on her in terms of, 'Right, take control of your life. 'Get a voice and do things your own way.' As the song says, 'It's your prerogative.' With her new husband by her side, Britney fires her management team in October 2004 and goes out on her own. Before Kevin was around, Britney was this gorgeous girl next-door from Louisiana that was polished. When Kevin came in the picture, the influence of his background became very clear in their relationship. And what we ended up with was kinda a white trash Britney. Kevin the little, you know, wannabe rapper guy makes her look like she's really dangerous and really, like, you know, kind of, cool and out there and edgy. Within a year of marriage, Britney and Kevin start their family with sons Sean and Jayden. The paparazzi interest only intensifies in Britney Spears as a mother. Britney got accused again and again of being a bad parent. And in my opinion, she wasn't a bad parent. What she was was a public parent. When you have 40 trucks of paparazzi photographers following you everywhere you go, taking thousands of photos a second, you only need to catch one moment that doesn't look appropriate, and you can run a whole story about how Britney's a bad parent around it. While Britney is facing criticism and her own stalling career, her husband, Kevin, is out of the house working on his own hip-hop dreams. Finally, Britney finds a man to marry and to start a family with, but he's never around. I'm sure this gave her a sense of not being enough for him. This must have been devastating for her. The unravelling of Britney Spears becomes evident as her marriage starts to deteriorate. Britney Spears files for divorce from Kevin Federline in November 2006. And I think what you have to do now is you take this thread back to the domestic chaos and the unravelling of her parent's marriage. The moment it happens, it becomes a very traumatic echo of her own childhood. Having stalled her own career for three years, Britney makes the business decision to rehire her former manager Larry Rudolph. From the outside, it seems Britney Spears is trying to take control of her life, but inside she's unravelling. She wanted everything to work. She put everything on this marriage, and it didn't. Panic attacks, depression, the heartbreak, the press attention, the magnifying glass is still on you. * Britney's break-up with Justin Timberlake snowballs into a mountain of bad decisions, from quickie marriages to cleaning house professionally. Now a single mother and out of the game, Britney hits the town where more bad influences lurk. During the period of time where Britney had filed for separation from Kevin, it was party time. She was young, beautiful, rich and living in Hollywood. Do whatever you want. Well, who wouldn't just phone up Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and go crazy in Hollywood? They were jumping in and out of cars with no underwear on. Photographers were catching all these pictures. It was like media madness for about a good 18 months. What follows is a classic intervention. Britney's parents and Kevin send her to Antigua for rehab treatment in February of 2007. Britney checks herself out after only 24 hours. At this time in her life, Britney wanted to be a mother. She wanted her career back on track, and everything was going wrong. And when you throw those elements together, that's gotta be crazy making. Kevin gives Britney an ultimatum ` go back to rehab or you won't see your kids. Terrified, Britney snaps. Britney shaving her head is a demonstration of how much she is suffering. It's because physically you can now see it. I think she needed to tell the world, like, 'I am not OK.' I think she's lashing out at anything and everything that had to do with creating the pop star that she had become. She wanted to be removed from everything that was Britney Spears and shed that identity. I mean, she literally lost it. The epitome of 'losing it'. The next eight months of Britney's life are in a complete spiral. She... Once again,... Including Larry Rudolph. She... She... ...after hitting a parked car and fleeing. She has a disastrous comeback performance. And... All of this leaves the door open for someone to come in and fill the void. Sam Lutfi came into Britney's life ostensibly to be her manager. He stepped into a void when she had nothing and no one to hold on to. You could argue that there are some people there at the right place, at the right time. He was there at the wrong time, but in the right place. This guy was seriously bad news, and I think that if anyone is to blame for Britney's downfall, he would be heading up my list of those people. I think it speaks to how low Britney had fallen. He would constantly parade her around, set up press and paparazzi incidents. With all due respect to Sam Lutfi, he did not have the experience to manage someone of Britney Spears' scale of celebrity. He was nothing but the worst-case scenario for Britney. The door was left open for Sam Lutfi to enter. Britney is totally alone, with her parents back home focused on Jamie Lynn's career. Court documents allege that while Lutfi was claiming to help Britney's comeback, secretly he was drugging her in order to control her. He pulled the battery link out of her car so that she couldn't go anywhere. But in order to keep the price on her head high so that when she left the house the next day, we would all make money and he'd make his cut. It wasn't just Sam Lutfi that got to Britney. By the end of 2007, one of the relentless paparazzi Adnan Ghalib found himself on the other side of the lens. I think the oddest turn was when Britney started to date Adnan Ghalib, a member of the paparazzi. You are one minute complaining about them being on your tail, and then ultimately you start dating one of them. It was a huge story for all of us. All the paparazzi were standing outside all night long, talking about, 'Oh my God, did you speak to Adnan? Has only text Adnan? What's going on?' It was like a, you know` It was a real gossip thing. I also believe there was an element of Britney that thought that she could kinda control the paparazzi by befriending them. It all comes to a head in January 2008. Emergency services are called to Britney's home. I got the phone call saying, 'Get your arse up to Britney's now.' It all spiralled out of control. We all saw the paparazzi, the helicopters, the ambulances coming into her house. She ran into the bathroom with her children, not wanting to let go of them. And that's when the authorities stepped in, because she kinda overstepped the terms and conditions of this and that. The emergency services arrived, and they went in. About 20 minutes later, they came out with what obviously was Britney. Really sad sight of seeing her on a gurney, put in the back of an ambulance. Your heart goes out to the poor girl then. We were worried she was gonna die and our payday was over. I think there were a lot of people looking at this downward spiral and wondering where it would end and would it even end well ` and tragically? Immediately following Britney's hospitalisation, her father, Jamie, is granted conservatorship over her affairs. He immediately gets a restraining order against Sam Lutfi, alleging he was controlling Britney's life and finances. I think her father jumping in, swooping in and protecting her, putting a restraining order against Sam, taking over her affairs was the best thing that ever happened to her. I've said this, and I'll stick to it. I think that action by Jamie Spears, led by Lynne Spears, saved Britney's life. In 2015, Britney regains primary custody of her children. Almost 10 years on, Jamie still has legal control of Britney's business. I think that when Britney's father swooped in, it was relief for her that she could finally just relax and focus on her recovery, and he would do the rest. I think this is why after that point, we finally see her getting back on her feet and doing well. Britney has a successful show in Las Vegas and is a loving and attentive mother to Sean and Jayden. Britney Spears is now back in the ascendant. This is a comeback story. It's a redemptive tale. She's a survivor. She's someone who has managed to beat all the odds. You know, and she's still here, and I think people were expecting to mourn Britney. Instead there's a rebirth of Britney. In terms of comeback stories, you just gotta bow down to her. She has had the spirit to come back, and I think she's going from strength to strength, and long may it continue. A childhood in the spotlight leaves Britney with a need to please and little in the way of the coping skills. Seeking solace in a relationship with men wasn't the answer. Her post-divorce spiral opened the door to outsiders looking to take advantage of her vulnerability. What lies ahead for these two stars? Will Britney live out her stardom and reign as pop's princess, to become the queen of Vegas? Will Lindsay again find her place on the silver screen? Or will they once again come under the influence? Copyright Able 2018