Somehow Britney escaped from the psych ward yesterday – apparently a lawyer overruled the medical recommendation and let her go. As you probably know, she tore off immediately for Adnan and the paps. Why her parents were not holding vigil outside that hospital door, why Lynne wasn’t handcuffed to her child, how she managed to saunter outta there without her parents throwing themselves in her way is beyond me.

Those two have failed her, time and again. And they failed her yesterday too. Save it with the Spears family sympathy and the PR campaign to reposition themselves as good parents. They’ve never been good parents. From the moment they started whoring out their child they ceased to be good parents.
As mentioned yesterday, the new Rolling Stone examines why and how and when Britney went awry. The writer is not kind to her family but also not kind to Britney, because at the end of the day, on top of the crazy, she’s addicted to the attention, non?

If Britney was really who we believed her to be – a puppet, a grinning blonde without a cool thought in her head, a teasing coquette clueless to her own sexual power – none of this would have happened. She is not book-smart, granted. But she is intelligent enough to understand what the world wanted of her: that she was created as a virgin to be deflowered before us, for our amusement and titillation. She is not ashamed of her new persona – she wants us to know what we did to her. While it may be true that Britney suffers from the adult onset of a genetic mental disease (or a disease created by fame, yet to be named); or that she is a “habitual, frequent and continuous” drug user, as the judge declared; or that she is a cipher with boundless depths, make no mistake – she is enjoying the chaos she is creating. The look on her face when she’s goofing around with paparazzi – one of whom, don’t forget, she is dating – is often one of pure excitement.

And then there’s Justin. This is the detail that was dangled by the New York Daily News – again, as I wrote yesterday, it’s no big deal. Excerpt below:

Britney’s savior was Justin Timberlake, whom she started dating around 1999. “Justin had his head screwed on so straight, and he rescued her from that world,” says a friend. “He became the great force in her life, but it started a pattern – she began to look for guys to help her get away from the people who control her.” Even though Britney was one of the biggest stars in the world and Timberlake was still just another guy in ’NSync, the power balance in their relationship was solid. “She wasn’t competitive about attention,” says a close friend. “She just wanted to be in love with him.” Once again, her manager gave her instructions: The partnership was to be kept under wraps, and they had to tell everyone they planned to stay abstinent until marriage. “They were always running in between each other’s buses, and one night Justin came back to the bus and said to me, ‘Dude, smell my fingers,’ ” says Henson. “Justin slept with her that night.” It was another year before they admitted publicly that they were a couple.

It’s a great read, with more inside information on her cheating on him with Wade Robson, on her breasts implants encouraged by her mother, and on her relationship with KFed.

The magazine hits newsstands tomorrow. Also click here for the magazine’s extensive photo collection chronicling her young life with many classics from when Britney was on top of the world. Here she is yesterday back on the scene.