Spears And Lutfi Return To Court

The legal divorce of Spears and Lutfi has been two-and-a-half years in the making and now it has been determined that a jury of peers should decide if Lutfi is entitled to 15 percent of Spears’ monthly income when they were a business team.

Lutfi had his share of attention, with the media alluding to him as a Svengali character. Spears met him at a nightclub in 2007, according to Lutfi’s lawsuit, when he was a consultant for his mother’s gas station business. At the time, Spears was not only in the midst of a child custody battle but was estranged from her parents, struggling with drug abuse and had fired her “agent, manager, bodyguards and publicist, and she was not working,” according to the lawsuit.

He said he counseled her to get clean and before too long she was claiming him as her manager. He made it legal in July 2007 when he downloaded an artist management contract and gave her a copy, according to the suit. Although Spears was not working – yet making $800,000 a month – Lutfi says he supported her through her drug reliance and her lost child custody battle.

The night she lost the court case, she allegedly stayed in a parking lot and called him saying he was “one of the few people she trusted.” That night, he claims, he moved into her home. He claims that he assisted in arranging parties, purchasing personal items, and interfacing with her contacts, as well as dealing with the 30 to 100 paparazzi that were following her daily. “Sam set rules for the paparazzi, which included not entering private property, not following Britney into stores, not running red lights and saving Britney a parking space when they followed her to a location,” the lawsuit alleges. “If the paparazzi followed his rules, he would text them Britney’s itinerary so they could get the photographs they wanted.

“By January 2008, Britney and Sam trusted the paparazzi and treated them as free bodyguards.” The lawsuit comes after Lutfi failed to win a court case against Spears’ mom, Lynne, for painting a different picture in her memoir, Through the Storm, that characterized Lutfi as a manipulator who secretly drugged Spears and cut her off from her family (there is a current assault claim that Spears’ father punched Lutfi because of all of this).

The case was thrown out, and a California appeals court recently upheld the opinion, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The concerns about breach of contract, however, are obviously of worth and a jury is to consider the minutia of what Lutfi and Spears agreed to do and not do as a business team.