The early 2000s was cruel to some notable pop stars, including Britney Spears. The Toxic singer’s close pal revealed in 2021 to The Sun that Spears’ management team pushed her to the brink of exhaustion during the 2007 New Year Eves’ VIP event and consequently she fainted. Sean Phillip, who was with Spears at the time, recalled she wore out due to being overtired and collapsed. Afterward, he carried her out of the venue and took her upstairs away from the crowd. “The reality is that she was exhausted,” revealed Philip. “She was being worked to the bone, and was in no fit state to still be performing.” He continued, “The medication she was on was not helping her at all. She was becoming paranoid like I’d never, ever seen her before. She fainted in the club at the party she was hosting. I had to get her out, carrying her over my shoulder with a black suit jacket thrown over her, and stopping people trying to take pictures on their phones. By the time we got back upstairs, she was fine, but crying hysterically, and so upset. She was saying, ‘Why am I so accessible? Why am I still doing club gigs?'”
Meanwhile, media at the time reported that Spears apparently dozed off during the NYE event, claimed her then-manager. In an exclusive interview with ABC News, the host of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Robin Leach, said he stood barely 6 feet away from the ‘Princess of Pop’ as he rang in the new year at Caesar’s Palace’s PURE nightclub when he witnessed her collapse in front of his eyes. “She suddenly slides to the floor. Pandemonium and panic break out in her 27-strong person camp,” recalled Leach. “The woman standing 2 feet away from me immediately shouts out at the top of her voice, ‘Make sure there are no pictures, no photographers at all!’ At the same time, her bodyguard, who was 4 feet from me calls for extra security, and the bodyguards from PURE nightclub race up there.”
However, Spears’ manager, Larry Rudolph, contradicted Philip and Leach’s account and the now-42-year-old singer fell asleep shortly after the New Year’s countdown. “By about one o’clock, she was just done, so we took her out. She was not drunk. She was just tired and falling asleep.” But Leach vividly recollected, “They throw … it looked to me like a woolen scarf, almost as large as a blanket … over Britney. All the bodyguards had flashlights, which they shone in the eyes of the clubgoers so that if they tried to get a photograph, all they would get is the blinding light.”
It is possible to believe this narrative because according to the former New York Daily News gossip columnist Ben Widdicombe, author of Gatecrasher: How I Helped the Rich Become Famous and Ruin the World, the pop stars of the 2000s like Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, and the likes succumbed to inhumane working conditions. Widdicombe said, “The media was incredibly cruel to Britney and other women at the time. It was clear to us reporting staff at the time that we needed to leave Britney alone. Her mental health required the media to step back. I was seriously worried that either Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, or Britney Spears would die.”
