Britney Spears and Sam Asghari are officially divorced and single. The dissolution of the couple's marriage was finalised on May 3 by a Los Angeles County judge, nearly two years after the two were married. The judgment comes hours after the 42-year-old pop superstar and the 30-year-old model and actor informed the court that they had reached a divorce settlement, and a week after Spears reached a court settlement with her father over lingering issues in her conservatorship.
The couple filed court papers Thursday and Friday saying they had reached an agreement on dividing their assets. Few details were made public, but neither Britney Spears nor Asghari will get future spousal support. Asghari had said in his initial petition that he would seek financial support. Any future disputes would need to be settled in private arbitration.
Spears and Asghari separated in July, and he filed for divorce in August. They had been dating for about seven years. The two had no children together, so no custody agreement was necessary. Spears wrote in her memoir published last year that she and Asghari had a miscarriage early in a pregnancy about a month before they married.
Emails seeking details or comment from lawyers for both Spears and Asghari were not immediately returned. Their marriage at her home in June 2022 in front of guests including Selena Gomez, Drew Barrymore, Paris Hilton and Madonna was seen as a triumphant milestone in her newly reclaimed life after she was freed a few months earlier from the court conservatorship that controlled her life and money for more than 13 years. But they would split just over a year later.
Last Friday, Spears and her father, Jamie Spears, reached a settlement on the lingering issues from that legal arrangement, avoiding what could have been a long, ugly and revealing trial that was scheduled to start later this month. Spears has said little publicly of the split.
In an Instagram post soon after the divorce filing, she said, “I'm not here to explain why because its honestly nobody's business !!! But, I couldn't take the pain anymore honestly !!!” In her memoir, “The Woman in Me”, released two months after Asghari filed for divorce, Spears speaks only briefly and positively of Asghari. She describes him holding her hand while she addressed a judge remotely during a key hearing that helped end her conservatorship.
Like the vast majority of those who file for divorce in California, Asghari cited irreconcilable differences as the reason for the split. It was the third marriage for Spears. She has two teenage sons with previous husband Kevin Federline, to whom she was married from 2004 to 2007, a time when intense media scrutiny led to emotional difficulty for her.
Spears was married for less than three days in 2004 to childhood friend Jason Alexander, who attempted to crash her wedding to Asghari and was later convicted of misdemeanour trespassing and battery. Spears met and began dating Asghari, a model and actor, when he appeared in her video for the song “Slumber Party” in 2016. She cited her desire to marry him as among the reasons she wanted an end to the constraining conservatorship, which she said was preventing it. The two announced their engagement in September of 2021.
Since the conservatorship ended, Spears has put out music, including a collaboration with Elton John in 2022. But she has not performed live in years, and she said she has no intention of performing or making a new album.
