Britney Spears: The Road to Ruin
Posted Wednesday 01/23/2008 12:00 AM in
Guide
by
Michael Joseph Gross
6. The wingmanWhen Sam Lutfi met britney last year, they were both going through transitions. She had begun distancing herself from all of her old intimates; he had been barred by a restraining order from contacting Danny Haines, a 29-year-old man from Orange County who had been his close friend for two years.
There are at least two other outstanding restraining orders against Lutfi. Documents for both cases demonstrate his violent temper. This third case, however, raises deeper and more chilling questions about Lutfi’s character, and about his relationship with Britney.
Danny Haines, who spoke exclusively with Blender, met Sam Lutfi on MySpace in the fall of 2005. Haines was at a low ebb when they met, he says. The bare outlines of his situation bear some resemblance to Britney’s: His professional life was adrift, his relationships with old friends and family were in disrepair and he had some secrets that he didn’t want anyone to know.
Lutfi was fun to be with. He claimed to be friends with celebrities from Kate Beckinsale to Roseanne Barr, and he seemed to know every nightclub bouncer in L.A. With Lutfi, Haines says, “it seemed like you could break all the rules.”
Their fun was fueled by long, confessional conversations in which Haines described his unsatisfying, distant relationships with his family. Lutfi’s account of his own background—he grew up in a tight-knit family in Woodland Hills, California, where his mother reportedly owns several gas stations—sounded ideal by comparison.
Haines says Lutfi wanted to know everything about him—every secret, every problem—and Haines complied. It seemed that nothing shocked Lutfi, even when Haines, who is straight, told him about some X-rated, homoerotic modeling he had done for a photographer he’d met online.
Haines remembers the night when Lutfi offered to straighten out his life: “He said, ‘I can help you. I can help your parents. But you need to be honest with me. If you’re lying to me about anything, I’ll know.’”
To Haines’s fractured ego, Lutfi’s social skills and emotional intelligence were magnetic. He encouraged Haines to “stand up for myself” and at the same time worked to become indispensable to him. Lutfi ingratiated himself with Haines’s family, acting as a go-between and informal counselor.
Haines says their relationship was not romantic or sexual but that Lutfi was more jealous than a lover. He could be supportive one day and vicious the next, leaving voicemails tracing extremes from “You’re a worthless motherfucker” to “I love you, man. I love you to death.” He says that although Lutfi also made some feckless gestures toward an old-fashioned con job—Haines claims Lutfi borrowed about $18,000 that he did not pay back, though Lutfi’s mother finally settled much of the debt—Lutfi reserved most of his energy for emotional blackmail and extortion. “Everybody hates you,” he wrote to Haines, suggesting that Haines should just kill himself: “Seriously, sleeping pills, LOTS of them … ” (Lutfi declined to comment for this story.)
When Haines finally cut the cord, Lutfi humiliated him. He e-mailed naked photographs of Haines to his family, friends, colleagues and employer. Then he texted and called incessantly, telling Haines he hoped his sister would be “raped to death,” according to the restraining order. In an e-mail about Haines’s mother (“that Mormon bitch”), Lufti wrote, “I hope Satan devours her flesh and bones,” and said he looked forward to the day when he would “piss on [her] burial.”
Such communications moved Haines to seek the restraining order, which also protects his mother from being contacted by Lutfi. A few months later, Haines says that Lutfi called his brother-in-law to say he’d met a celebrity whom he wanted to set Haines up with. Later, Haines saw photographs of Lutfi with Spears in the tabloids. In those pictures, Lutfi was wearing a bodybuilding shirt and baseball cap that he had taken from Haines.
Haines, whose relationship with Lutfi was the subject of a few obscure blog comments after Lutfi’s other restraining orders were reported in December, says that he subsequently received an e-mail from Lutfi’s sister’s address, which he read as a warning: “One of your friends is writing to some magazines about your history with my brother … I don’t think that’s wise for him to do.” The warning came with what sounded like a threat: “Those pictures and your history isn’t so positive either and I’m sure you wouldn’t want that to be public as well.”
Informed of the details of Haines’s relationship with Lutfi, Jamie and Lynne Spears, who declined to discuss Lutfi on the record, both expressed grave concern to Blender about his ongoing involvement in their daughter’s life and have encouraged Haines to go public with the story.
“If Sam’s not doing anything wrong with Britney, if he’s not worried about being exposed,” Haines asks, “why would his sister be saying, Don’t talk about my brother and his past?”
7. The worst person in the world
Britney showed at least a glimmer of sanity when, on Saturday, January 5, she reportedly ignored “Dr. Phil” McGraw, the TV therapist who surprised her at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, then spoke about the visit to Entertainment Tonight. But even he would have been an improvement on Lutfi, who, Haines says, described himself as an “unlicensed counselor” in the court hearing that led to the restraining order.
The symbiosis between stars and sleazebags is as old as show business. The story rarely has a happy ending (see Anna Nicole Smith), and talent alone saves no one (see Judy Garland). Lutfi’s personal history adds a frightening element to the unsavory task of forecasting Britney’s fate.
For countless observers, Britney’s latest unraveling brought that impulse to the surface. A Detroit radio station announced, then canceled, a “Britney Suicide-Watch” contest, inviting listeners to name the date for a $1,000 prize. Just shy of grave-dancing, Perez Hilton g
loated that his
Web site received an all-time high of more than 10 million hits on the
day the star was hospitalized: “Thanks, Britney.”Others voice what seem to be kinder thoughts. Just a few weeks before the January meltdown, Bonnie Fuller, chief editorial director of American Media Inc., which publishes Star magazine, told Blender that “everybody wants her to get better.” Then, asked to name her best-selling Spears cover story, Fuller answered, “BRITNEY HITS ROCK BOTTOM was a big one,” seemingly without irony.
“I think she’s really lost most of her fans’ sympathy,” Fuller continued. “She’s done the ultimate betrayal to her fans, by appearing to be a bad mother. That’s something that even the most steadfast fan has a problem with. You always want to think that your idols are essentially good. They may be misunderstood or misguided, may have fallen victim to addictions that they can’t control, but they’re basically good people.”
Britney became the tabloids’ wet dream by making herself the very image of a bad person. More than that: the worst person. There is, it seems, no limit to the number of things you can hate her for. She’s irresponsible, lazy, selfish, arrogant, stupid, tacky, rich and so depraved as to look almost subhuman. (Paris Hilton nicknamed her “the animal.”) She does not take care of herself, and still she could have sex with almost anyone she wants. She revels in her own violation and invites you to the orgy: “I can’t control myself/They want more/Well, I’ll give ’em more … ” she sings on Blackout.
After Britney’s catatonic VMAs performance of “Gimme More,” a short video called “Leave Britney Alone!” became a monster hit on YouTube. Chris Crocker, an androgynous actor from Tennessee, appeared on the verge of nervous breakdown, a lone voice crying out in her defense. It was a sequel to a video he had posted the previous week, “Back up, Britney haters!”: “I don’t just like Britney when she’s glitzy … I like Britney when she looks homeless. I like Britney when her hair extensions, her tracks are showing. I like Britney when her cootch is showing … Because I love BRIT. NEY. OK? Not the persona. The person. I love Britney for real reasons. I love Britney for Britney.”
Crocker, naturally, parlayed his YouTube fame into a deal for a reality show. There is no way of knowing how much of his screed was staged and how much was sincere. Yet the sentiment, like all fans’ feelings about celebrities, requires one fundamental correction: Chris Crocker can’t love the real Britney, because he does not know the real Britney.
Yet even the people who do know the real Britney don’t know her anymore. Her former manager Johnny Wright says, “I’m not pointing fingers, but I can’t believe that she woke up one morning and said, ‘I don’t want my family, or anyone else I knew, to be in touch with me anymore.’
“People say she needs to go to rehab. I think she just needs a friend—somebody not caught up in Hollywood, not looking for a paycheck. Somebody she trusts has to step up and break it down for her.”
When Wright worked with her, Britney had a personal assistant named Felicia Culotta. “She was her friend first, and she worked for peanuts. She had no other agenda than Britney’s well-being,” Wright says.
Recently he told her, “‘Felicia, you need to reach out to her.’”
Culotta’s answer was a measure of Britney’s isolation, and a sign of her peril. She said, “‘Johnny, they won’t let me in.’”
