Will Britney Spears ever be truly free?

If you want to cheapen an emotion or put its authenticity in doubt, stick a hashtag in front of it. The #FreeBritney brigade wouldn’t agree. Twelve years ago, they hashtagged those words for a reason. Because fans like to believe they know you better than you know yourself. And devout fans of the embattled pop star have long believed that 39-year-old Spears should be freed from the conservatorship which has given her father, Jamie, control of her $60 million estate ever since her well-documented breakdown in 2007.

On Thursday, a week after a New York Times Presents documentary, Framing Britney Spears, was released on FX and Hulu – detailing her conservatorship as well as the misogyny she faced in the media, prompting Spears’s misfortunes to trend once again – #FreeBritney campaigners were celebrating what they saw as a milestone in their 12-year battle.

“The #FreeBritney movement has won its first victory! Congratulations to everyone and to Britney!” crowed one on Twitter, after a Los Angeles judge denied a request by Spears’s father to retain some of his rights over the pop star’s estate. Yet this is just the smallest victory in a legal tangle that may take years to unsnarl – besides which, can the former child star ever truly be free?

“The sad truth about Britney,” says a well-placed source who has known the star since her teens, “is that it has been a long time since she enjoyed the kind of freedom available to the rest of us." In court, the lawyers said Spears was "afraid of her father" amd would not resume her career while he controlled it.

It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to explain that when Spears shaved her head in full view of the hordes of paparazzi her own bodyguards had allegedly taken bribes from in February 2007, she was attempting to shear herself free of the ‘Pop Princess’ persona she had been moulded to fit from the age of three.

Of the childhood that saw her rise from a local stage debut at five to a starring role in Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club – alongside Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake and Ryan Gosling – at the age of 11, Spears has said: “I found out what I’m supposed to do at an early age.” Little wonder the drink, drugs, deadbeat boyfriends and husbands and collective poor decisions she wasn’t “supposed” to make took on such allure.

Justin Timberlake, who dated Spears when they were teen stars, this week released a statement apologising for his behaviour towards her. Timberlake had faced accusations of misogyny following the release of last week's documentary. He had spoken publicly about sleeping with Spears and later vaguely accused her of cheating on him. "I failed," he wrote on Instagram.

Today, after repeated stints in rehab, a comeback tour, a four-year Las Vegas residency and the release of several new albums, many would like to believe that all that is behind her – and that Britney’s real life will begin at 40. Only this is, of course, simplistic, and the reality, according to my source, is that “the whole situation is a mess I can only liken to a funhouse of mirrors; when just when you think you know what you’re up against, another facet presents itself. In fact in many ways Britney was more ‘advanced’ and in a better place at the beginning of her career than she is now.”

It’s important to understand that the conservatorship Spears is currently fighting to have removed in court doesn’t just include financial and professional decisions but medical ones too. "I was told that if she wants to go and get a Starbucks even now, she basically has to ask permission," says my source. "So in many ways the guardianship she is under is similar to the ‘two to one’ support system we have in our care system, and a way of protecting her not just from the predators out there, but from herself.”

The bid to remove her father’s conservatorship may have been instigated by Spears, but is, I’m told, “very much bound up with internal domestic politics and family friction, particularly between Britney’s sons and her father.” Sean, 15, and Jayden, 14, from the pop star’s marriage to Kevin Federline, “are now young men with their own strong opinions on their mother’s situation, and while they are close to their grandmother, their tensions with Jamie are no secret.” But whether it’s her fans, her family or her men, Spears has been brought up to please, “and she thinks that doing this will keep everybody happy.”

Whether enough time and thought has been devoted to what would make Spears happy is unclear. Couldn’t she slink off to a secluded beachfront mansion and live out the second half of her life in (relative) blissful anonymity? “I’m not sure she wants to go off and enjoy her millions because she really loved her Vegas residency, being on stage and making music – she needs the structure all that gives her,” adds my source. “And although Britney finds the conservatorship too strict, she needs someone both to manage her career and have a hand on the rudder in her life generally. She doesn’t know how to live. All she knows is how to perform.”

The same could doubtless have been said of Michael Jackson, Shia LaBeouf, Amanda Bynes, Macaulay Culkin and Lindsay Lohan, and although parental stability and support clearly play a large part in whether child stars are able to withstand the pressures of celebrity as they grow up, I have interviewed many who have emerged if not completely unscathed, then at least fairly well-rounded, and able to enjoy their own success, alongside marriage and children. Whatever it was that made Spears as vulnerable as she apparently remains today – and the fights she witnessed as a child in a dysfunctional family that lived in fear of her father’s alcoholic rages are said to have left her “a bundle of nerves” – means that she will probably always be at risk from the darker side of the celebrity eco-system.

Earlier this week, Spears seemed to address both the Framing Britney Spears documentary and her #FreeBritney campaigners for the first time, with a post on her Instagram account that read: “Remember, no matter what we think we know about a person’s life it is nothing compared to the actual person living behind the lens!!!!... I’ll always love being on stage ... but I am taking the time to learn and be a normal person.”

Her words reminded me of a 2009 interview I did with Beyoncé – who is one of most stable and well-rounded A-listers I have ever met – and her admission that, feeling suffocated by the pressures of her own fame earlier that year, she took off, incognito, to her home town in Texas. “I wore flats and no make-up, went to visit my grandmother’s grave, ate in the restaurants I used to go to as a kid and ordered the same strawberry shortcake… Then I went to Weiner’s, this little discount shop, and bought a couple of $5 T-shirts.” It was the slice of normality she craved – until she heard people whispering: “There’s no way it’s her – not in Weiner’s!”

Addressing the court on Thursday, Britney’s lawyer, Samuel D Ingham, said his aim was to “figure out together the best way to handle this complex estate for the benefit of my client.” And one hopes all this is resolved to her benefit, whilst fearing that true freedom of the unhashtagged kind – not least from the constant whispers – might forever be beyond Spears’s reach.