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 filed for divorce on August 16 in Los Angeles, citing “irreconcilable differences” and listing the date of separation as July 28, 2023. In documents obtained by Variety, Asghari is asking for spousal support and attorney’s fees and says he “has yet to determine the full nature and extent of the separate property assets and obligations of each party.”
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In a statement on his social media, posted the day after he filed for divorce, Asghari posted: “After 6 years of love and commitment to each other my wife and I have decided to end our journey together. We will hold onto the love and respect we have for each other and I wish her the best always. Shit happens.” In his post, he also asked for the media to be “kind and thoughtful.”
Spears and Asghari signed a prenuptial agreement prior to their marriage, a source tells Variety, describing the prenup as “rock solid” to ensure the pop star’s protection.
In the 24 hours after divorce news broke, tabloid media reports had swirled, citing anonymous sources that claimed Asghari was threatening Spears to pay him more than what the prenup provided. In a statement to Variety, a representative for Asghari denied those reports: “There are many claims that Sam is challenging the prenup and threatening to exploit his ex-wife with videos,” says Asghari’s rep, Brandon Cohen. “However, all these claims are false, as no negative intention has ever been directed towards her and never will be. Sam has always and will always support her.”
Asghari and Spears first met on the set of her 2016 music video for “Slumber Party,” a song from her album, “Glory.” Asghari is a fitness trainer, model and actor who, since being with Spears, has appeared in shows including “Black Monday” and “Hacks.” He and the singer were engaged in September 2021, and got married in June 2022, after dating for more than five years.
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.
Page Six first broke the news that Spears hired Wasser in her divorce from Asghari.
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.
Spears has not commented on the split.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with a statement from Asghari, as well as a representative for Asghari, in addition to divorce documents that were filed on August 16, and were obtained with Variety. The headline has been altered to reflect the divorce filing.
