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Newly released police report and dashcam from Britney Spears’ March DUI arrest describe her as confrontational and flamboyant, but with a BAC below the limit.
The California Highway Patrol report and dashcam video from Britney Spears‘ March 4 DUI arrest were obtained by The Associated Press on Friday, and they paint a stranger picture than the routine traffic stop the singer’s eventual plea deal had implied.
Spears, pulled over for speeding and swerving on U.S. 101 in Ventura County near the LA County line, refused to exit her BMW for roughly ten minutes. When she did, the report says, she smelled of alcohol and failed field sobriety tests. Her blood alcohol level on two breath tests registered at .05 and .06, both below California’s .08 legal limit.
The most vivid passages of the report describe a mood that shifted by the minute. “Her speech was rapid and slurred, her gait was unsteady, and she was fidgeting with her fingers,” the CHP report reads. “Her mood changed from confrontational and agitated to flamboyant and compliant. She also appeared to speak with a British accent at times.”
Spears, at one point, offered the officers a line that has been making the rounds since the release. “I could probably drink four bottles of wine and take care of you, I’m an angel.” She told the same officers, asked to rate her own drunkenness, that she was at zero, and that she had only one mimosa hours earlier.
My Motherlode’s AP-wire write-up walks through the full report, the back-and-forth before she exited the car, and the rehab stint that followed.
A bottle of Adderall, the ADHD stimulant, was found in her purse and was not prescribed to her, per the report. She gave a blood sample for a separate drug test; those results were not included in the publicly available paperwork.
Her hesitation to exit the car had its own logic. Spears told officers she had been pranked and harassed in the past, and that as a woman she had the right to decline. She also said she feared standing on the highway. ClickOnDetroit’s version of the wire report quotes her offering to host the officers at her house instead: “I’ll make you food or lasagna, whatever you want. I have a pool.”
She was eventually cuffed, taken to jail, and released on bail hours later. She voluntarily checked into a rehabilitation facility soon after.
On May 4, Spears pleaded guilty to reckless driving involving alcohol and drugs, a charge reduced from the original misdemeanor DUI. The plea, prosecutors said, is standard for first-time defendants with no crash or injury on the road and a sub-.08 BAC. She avoided additional jail time.
News4Jax’s copy of the AP report notes her lawyer Michael Goldstein’s comments after the plea hearing, which Spears did not attend.
“I don’t think anybody’s happy about pleading guilty to anything,” Goldstein said, “but under the circumstances, to get this behind her, I think everybody is pleased with the result.”
The arrest landed five years after the end of Spears’ 14-year conservatorship, which was terminated in 2021. The singer has since married, divorced, and published the 2023 memoir The Woman in Me.
The dashcam video, now public, is likely to be the most-replayed footage of her year.
