Britney Spears and her husband Sam Asghari have separated after 14 months of marriage, and Variety has learned the pop star is being represented by a dream team of Hollywood lawyers as she prepares for a divorce.
Spears has retained top divorce lawyer to the stars, Laura Wasser, and will continue to work with her powerhouse attorney, Mathew Rosengart, a former federal prosecutor who famously got her out of her conservatorship and out of the hands of her father’s control, Variety hears.
Neither Wasser or Rosengart immediately responded to Variety‘s request for comment.
Asghari — a trainer, model and actor who has appeared in the shows “Black Monday” and “Hacks” — proposed to Spears in September 2021, and the couple got married in June 2022. They had previously been dating for more than five years, after first meeting on the set of Spears’ 2016 music video for “Slumber Party,” a song from her “Glory” album.
A representative for Asghari did not respond to Variety‘s request for comment, regarding the separation.
When Spears become engaged to Asghari, she was still under a conservatorship. She was, however, on a path to soon being free from the legal arrangement with Rosengart aggressively and successfully working to have the court suspend her father, which was the first step in the eventual termination of the conservatorship.
When she had testified towards the end of her 13-year conservatorship, Spears shared her desire to get married to Asghari and have more children, but alleged she did not have permission to do so, as her finances and essentially every aspect of her life were being controlled by her conservators, including her father, Jamie Spears. “I would like to progressively move forward and I want to have the real deal, I want to be able to get married and have a baby. I was told right now in the conservatorship, I’m not able to get married or have a baby,” Spears pleaded to the judge in June 2021.
At the time of the couple’s engagement, legal experts confirmed to Variety that under a conservatorship, the conservatee does not have the right to enter into any sort of agreement on their own, so a marriage license would have needed to be approved by conservators. “Technically, she can’t sign off on the marriage license while she is under the conservatorship,” an attorney explained.
In December of 2021, the month after her conservatorship was terminated, a judge granted Spears the power to executive documents on her own for the first time in over 13 years, which would include signing off on a marriage license. “She has the power to do whatever she wants to do,” Rosengart had said to reporters outside of the courthouse. Roughly six months later, the couple was married.
Spears and Asghari wed in an intimate ceremony at Spears’ home in Thousand Oaks, Calif., in front of around 60 guests, including Madonna, Selena Gomez, Drew Barrymore and Paris Hilton. Her father, mother Lynn Spears and sister Jamie Lynn Spears were not in attendance.
Spears’ marriage to Asghari was her third. The former couple does not share any children together. In April 2022, two months before they were married, Spears and Asghari announced she was pregnant. The next month, the singer said that she had lost the baby.
The superstar has two teenage sons, Sean and Jayden, with her second husband, Kevin Federline, her former backup dancer to whom she was married from 2004 to 2007. The couple starred in their own short-lived reality show, “Britney and Kevin: Chaotic,” in 2005. The singer’s first marriage was to her childhood friend, Jason Alexander, which was annulled in 2004 after they were married for a total of 55 hours. In 2022, Alexander crashed Spears’ wedding to Asghari and was arrested for trespassing at her home.
Spears worked with Wasser when she was fighting Federline for custody of their two sons, so this is not the first time the “Baby One More Time” singer has worked with the attorney, who has represented a number of A-list clients in their high-profile divorces, including Kim Kardashian, Kevin Costner, Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp and more.
As for Spears’ professional life lately, the pop icon has released two songs since the termination of her conservatorship: one with Elton John, “Hold Me Closer,” and another with will.i.am, “Mind Your Business.” This October, Spears is set to release a highly-anticipated tell-all memoir for which she inked a landmark, multi-million dollar book deal.
Neither Spears nor Asghari have commented on their split.