Britney Spears was charged on Thursday with driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol, a misdemeanor, the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office said.
She is scheduled to be arraigned on Monday in Ventura County Superior Court. The criminal complaint filed in court did not specify the type of drug that prosecutors say Ms. Spears had taken. A spokesman for the district attorney’s office would not provide details.
Ms. Spears was arrested on suspicion of D.U.I. on the evening of March 4, after officers observed her driving fast and erratically, according to Officer Ryan Ayers, a California Highway Patrol spokesman.
At the time, a representative for the pop star called the situation “an unfortunate incident that is completely inexcusable,” adding that “Britney is going to take the right steps and comply with the law, and hopefully this can be the first step in long-overdue change that needs to occur in Britney’s life.”
Just over a month later, a representative said Ms. Spears had voluntarily checked herself into a treatment facility. He declined to specify the type of program she had entered. The singer’s drug use has long been the subject of speculation during her years in the spotlight.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s Ms. Spears became one of the world’s biggest pop stars with chart-topping hits like “ … Baby One More Time.” She also became a favorite target of tabloids and gossip publications, especially when falling out of line with the girl-next-door image that was once central to her brand. In 2007, for instance, she was seen with a shaved head, hitting a photographer’s car with an umbrella.
The next year, when she was 26, she was placed in a conservatorship that gave her father, Jamie Spears, control over her life and finances, even as she continued to make music and tour. After 13 years, she objected to the conservatorship in an impassioned speech to a judge, saying she had been drugged, compelled to work against her will and pushed into involuntary medical evaluations and rehab.
The judge terminated the arrangement in November 2021.
In Ms. Spears’s 2023 memoir, “The Woman in Me,” she disputed the idea that she had a persistent substance abuse problem. She wrote that her drinking had never been “out of control” and that her “drug of choice” had been Adderall, which is prescribed to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
In recent months, Ms. Spears’s posts on Instagram, where she regularly shared videos of herself dancing alone, raised alarm. She appeared disheveled or with bandages around her hands and wrists in some of the posts.
After her arrest in March, her representatives said her “loved ones are going to come up with an overdue needed plan to set her up for success for well-being.” She later posted videos of her spending time with her young-adult sons, with whom she has at times been estranged.
Matt Stevens is a Times reporter who writes about arts and culture from Los Angeles.
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