Sam Lutfi, who is now on the receiving end of a restraining order imposed by Britney Spears’ parents, was the one person by her side as she unraveled over the past six months.
In the latest issue of Us Weekly, on newsstands now, Spears’ de facto manager and confidant opens up about her bipolar disorder, how he medicated her, what happened the night she was hospitalized, and how her parents reacted.
“In the depressive episodes, it’s all crying,” Lutfi tells Us. “But in the manic episode, there’s very little crying or sympathy or compassion. She becomes another person. She becomes somebody that just doesn’t care about anybody or anything.”
“The British accent is part of the mania,” he adds. “She’ll stick to the British accent because she becomes comfortable with it… But you know, when the pink wig comes on, it’s getting bad.”
Lutfi says that when Spears was involuntarily committed to treatment at UCLA Medical Center on January 31, her mom, Lynne Spears, arrived and tried to remove her daughter from his guidance. “Well, he is better family than you guys will ever be,” Spears responded, according to Lutfi.
Lutfi tells Us that he gave Britney “a handful of pills” before her parents arrived. “I said these pills are working wonders, they are miracle pills,” he recalls. Spears, Lutfi says, agreed that the meds were helping her sleep.
(In their restraining order against Lutfi filed yesterday, Spears’ parents accuse him of drugging their daughter and being verbally abusive. Jamie, who has been named as his daughter’s conservator, “is doing what he has to do to save Britney,” a source tells Us.)
Spears is one of nearly six million American adults suffering from bipolar disorder, a mental illness consisting of extreme shifts in mood, thought, energy, and behavior patterns.
Lutfi, 33, tells Us only he, Spears, and her psychiatrist know what brought on her bipolar disorder “roughly five years ago.”
When the ambulance arrived to take Spears, “she was very quiet,” Lutfi tells Us.
“When I told her, she wrote me a note and put a big heart on it and it said, ‘I love you, Sam. Are there people coming? Circle yes or no,’” Lutfi recalls. “Oh, my God, it was funny, just the cutest little thing. I circled yes and I gave it back to her, and she looked at me and she’s like, ‘Oh, lord, here we go again.’”
Attorneys are fighting on Spears’ behalf to take conservatorship away from Jamie. Having Jamie in control of her estate and medical decisions is a worst-case scenario for Spears, sources tell Us.
