As if you needed reminding, Britney Spears had a full-on kerb-sitting dog-clutching sobbing meltdown on Monday night after a fight with her manager Sam Lutfi.
Nothing particularly unusual about that – Britney Spears seems to be contractually obliged to have a weird public meltdown every couple of weeks these days – but is Sam Lutfi really the steady hand that he's claimed to be?
Apparently not – it turns out that Sam Lutfi might be a weirdo with a bunch of restraining orders against him and a history of urging people to kill themselves. Which is, you know, inevitable.
It says a lot for the current state of Britney Spears that Kevin Federline is emerging as the most well-rounded character of the lot. And, seriously, the sight of the words 'Kevin Federline' and 'well-rounded' in the same sentence scares us as much as it does you.
Because look around at everyone else. There's Britney Spears' boyfriend Adnan Ghalib, a married paparazzo who immediately did all kinds of tell-all interviews about Britney when they split up for a day last week. Then there's Britney Spears' family – a slapper, a teenage almost-mother and some bloke respectively. And then there's Britney Spears' manager Sam Lutfi.
But Sam Lutfi is OK, because he's the man who phoned up Barbara Walters to tell her that Britney Spears is actually mental the other day. And even if that triggered off a public argument between Britney Spears and Sam Lutfi that ended up with Britney Spears crying on a pavement, Adnan Ghalib being refused entry to Britney's home, Britney's family trying to keep Britney away from Sam Lutfi and Sam Lutfi trying to keep Britney's family away from Britney, it was obviously the right thing to do because he's Britney's manager. Obviously.
And as Britney Spears' manager, it's Sam Lutfi's responsibility to protect Britney from danger, which mainly seems to involve telling people that Britney's family "have an agenda. Their agenda is jealousy," and texting Adnan Ghalib to tell him that he'll kill Britney. But despite his obvious sterling work at keeping Britney Spears on the straight and narrow, MTV has discovered that Sam Lutfi might be a teensy bit higher up the Creepy Weirdo scale than we thought:
According to three requests for restraining orders against him that have been obtained by MTV News — and are unrelated to Spears — Lutfi also has a dark side… Before Lutfi hooked up with Spears, he was a fixture in the life of Danny Haines, a former friend who claimed that their association turned sour when Lutfi allegedly sent nude pictures of him to his family, friends and employer, and tried to convince Haines to kill himself. "Seriously, sleeping pills, lots of them," Lutfi allegedly wrote to him, Haines told Blender magazine.
But, you know, other than the restraining orders and the whole suicide-convincing thing, we're sure Sam Lutfi is just lovely.
Seriously, though, we've looked at this from every possible angle and there's only one explanation for Britney Spears' current dire crisis – she has too many friends with shit facial hair. Honestly, both Sam Lutfi and Adnan Ghalib have those stupid little beardette things that run in a line from their bottom lip to their chin. Everyone – everyone – knows that people with beardettes are dickheads. So as soon as someone passes that memo onto Britney, we're sure everything will get straightened out nicely.
Read more:
Britney Spears' Manager/Friend Sam Lutfi: Prior Restraining Orders Paint A Dark Picture – MTV