Britney Spears’ Longtime Manager Resigns, Suggests She May Retire

Is Britney Spears planning to retire? A move by her longtime manager suggests that could be the case.

Larry Rudolph, who has been the singer's manager since before she achieved pop stardom with the 1998 hit “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” has announced that he is retiring from his role. 

“It has been over 2 1/2 years since Britney and I last communicated, at which time she informed me she wanted to take an indefinite work hiatus,” Rudolph wrote in a letter, which was sent to Spears’ co-conservators on Monday, according to Deadline. “Earlier today, I became aware that Britney had been voicing her intention to officially retire.”

Rudolph has not immediately responded to Oxygen.com’s request for comment.

He noted in his letter that he feels that “as her manager” it is in Spears’ “best interest for me to resign from her team as my professional services are no longer needed.” 

The manager’s letter came just days after Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Brenda Penny denied the singer’s request to have her father Jamie Spears removed as a conservator on her estate. Her lawyer Samuel D. Ingham III had asked for Bessemer Trust Company to become sole conservator in his place last year but the financial firm resigned as Britney’s co-conservator almost immediately after last week’s ruling. 

On June 23, Britney told Penny that she wanted out of her conservatorship during a 23-minute speech, describing it as “controlling” and “abusive.” The 39-year-old pleaded with the judge, telling her that since the conservatorship was put into place 13 years ago, she has been forced to work and perform against her will while ill, pushed into a mental health facility as punishment for not wanting to do a specific dance move, and forced to take lithium. She said she is not allowed to marry her partner or have another child, claiming her conservators won’t allow her to have her IUD removed. She cited her “management” several times, stating that she feels her father and her “management who played a huge role in punishing me when I said no ... [he] should be in jail.”

Rudolph specified in his letter that he has “never been a part of the conservatorship nor its operations.” 

He has been Britney’s manager since 1995 with the exception of some time in 2007 and 2008. She began pulling out of Las Vegas shows in 2019, alluding to a hiatus. 

“I deserve to have a life,” Spears said in her now famous testimony to Penny. “I’ve worked my whole life. I deserve to have a two- to three-year break and just, you know, do what I want to do.”

Conservatorships are typically employed for people who are deemed unable to make key decisions for themselves, yet the fact that Britney has never really stopped working, including her spearheading of an enormously successful multi-year Las Vegas residency, had fans crying foul at the constraints she's been placed under for years. Spears compared her seven-day work schedule with no days off to “sex trafficking” last week. Court documents obtained by the New York Times last month showed that Britney raised questions about the arrangement, and her father's fitness to oversee it, for years.

The next court date for the case is scheduled for July 14.

“I will always be incredibly proud of what we accomplished over our 25 years together,” Rudolph said in his letter. “I wish Britney all the health and happiness in the world, and I’ll be there for her if she ever needs me again, just as I always have been.”