Britney Spears was arrested in Ventura county, California, on Wednesday night for driving under the influence.

The singer was stopped and handcuffed by the California highway patrol at about 9.28pm local time, as first reported by TMZ and confirmed by Variety.

Spears was booked in the early hours of Thursday morning, at about 3.02am, and was released just after 6am.

After her release, Spears deleted her Instagram profile. Her most recent post was captioned: “Song representing fragility be careful my friends when dealing with the queen of hearts.”

Her arrest follows a legal victory earlier this week, when Spears was granted a restraining order against a 51-year-old Louisiana man who had been harassing her since 2013. According to Spears’ court filing, the man showed up at her Los Angeles home after making several “disturbing social media posts”.

Receiving this week’s DUI is not Spears’ first run-in with the law. In 2007, she faced four misdemeanor charges after an alleged hit-and-run with a parked car in Los Angeles. The charges were dropped after Spears paid the vehicle’s owner for damages.

In February, it was revealed that Spears sold her rights to her music catalogue in late 2025 in a reported $200m deal. The sale to independent music publisher Primary Wave came after the singer’s 13-year conservatorship, which drained her finances and which Spears described as “abusive”.

While under the conservatorship, Spears had no control over her assets and finances. “Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself … My father and his associates having control over my body and my money … makes me feel sick,” she wrote in her bestselling 2023 memoir The Woman in Me.

Spears’ deal with Primary Wave signed over her ownership of her hits including … Baby One More Time, Lucky and Everytime. The publisher also owns the catalogues of other music icons including Whitney Houston, Stevie Nicks and Prince.

In January, Spears announced in a lengthy Instagram post that she would “never perform in the US again”, citing “extremely sensitive reasons”. She didn’t rule out global appearances, adding: “I hope to be sitting on a stool with a red rose in my hair, in a bun, performing with my son … in the UK and AUSTRALIA very soon.”

Spears’ last full-length studio release was 2016’s Glory, which was heralded as a return to form by the Guardian’s Alex Macpherson, who described it as “a smooth, shapeshifting record – with the singer sounding like she’s having the time of her life”.

Since her release from the conservatorship in 2021, Spears has made few public appearances but regularly posted videos on social media, often showing her dancing at home. While no new album has followed, she has released one-off singles including the 2022 Elton John collaboration Hold Me Closer and 2023’s Mind Your Business with will.i.am.