Britney Spears has been arrested in Ventura County, Calif., Billboard has confirmed via records posted by the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office. According to Variety and TMZ, the pop star was arrested for suspicion of DUI.
According to the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office, Spears was arrested Wednesday (March 4) at 9:28 p.m. PT and booked at 3:02 a.m. PT. She was released at 6:07 a.m. PT Thursday.
Her court date is scheduled for May 4.
Billboard has reached out to Spears’ reps, as well as Ventura County Sheriff’s Office for more information.
The singer has previously faced legal issues, turning herself in to Los Angeles police in 2007 on charges of hit and run — video at the time showed she’d steered into a parked car with her vehicle before driving away — and driving without a valid license. A few months later, she was placed under a legal conservatorship, an arrangement that would last for the next 13 years. Her hit-and-run case was dismissed in 2008.
News of her alleged DUI comes as Spears has seemingly deleted her Instagram account, where she had spent recent years posting photos and videos of herself dancing at home, enjoying time on the water and hanging out with her son Jayden. The star shares him and older son Sean with ex-husband Kevin Federline, who moved with the boys to Hawaii in 2023. At Christmastime in 2024, Spears posted that she’d reunited with Jayden after not seeing him in two years.
This past October, Federline published his memoir, You Thought You Knew, and wrote about fearing for his famous ex-wife’s well-being. “The truth is, this situation with Britney feels like it’s racing toward something irreversible,” he wrote in the book. “It’s become impossible to pretend everything’s OK. From where I sit, the clock is ticking, and we’re getting close to the 11th hour. Something bad is going to happen if things don’t change, and my biggest fear is that our sons will be left holding the pieces.”
Spears quickly slammed the contents of the book, writing on Instagram at the time, “The constant gaslighting from ex-husband is extremely hurtful and exhausting.”
“I have always pleaded and screamed to have a life with my boys,” she’d added. “Relationships with teenage boys is complex. I have felt demoralized by this situation and have always asked and almost begged for them to be a part of my life.”
More recently, Spears has put her family on blast, having previously accused her father, Jamie Spears — who was in charge of her estate for many years under the terms of her conservatorship — of exploiting her, which he has denied. This past Christmas, she sarcastically wished a “merry late Christmas to my beautiful family who have never disrespected me, harmed me, ever done anything completely unacceptable or caused unbelievable trauma, the kind you can’t fix,” and in February, she wrote on Instagram that she was “lucky to even be alive with how my family treated me once in my life and now I’m scared of them.”
