Amanda Bynes has formally petitioned to end her conservatorship, moving to legally terminate the arrangement that the former child star has been living under for the last 9 years.
Bynes was first placed under a temporary conservatorship, controlled by her mother, Lynn Organ, in 2013, after—per Variety—she “allegedly set a driveway on fire and was hospitalized on an involuntary psychiatric hold.” The conservatorship was made permanent the following year.
Bynes, who’s now 35, has also filed a request for a capacity declaration, as part of California legal requirements to end the conservatorship, which places many life decisions for a person, including their financials, in the hands of a court-appointed third party. That hearing is set for March 22.
Bynes’ lawyer, David A. Esquibias, issued a statement to People today, saying that, “Amanda wishes to terminate her conservatorship. She believes her condition is improved and protection of the court is no longer necessary.”
The conservatorship system has, of course, been in the news extensively in recent years, in large part due to the attention surrounding Britney Spears’ eventually successful efforts to extricate herself from an even longer conservatorship of her own. Although Spears is a few years older than Bynes, their careers have several parallels, most notably a shared background that saw them rise to fame as teenagers on children’s television. (Spears on The Mickey Mouse Club, Bynes on Nickelodeon’s kid-aimed sketch series All That.)
Bynes’ most recent film credit was in 2010, when she appeared in the Emma Stone comedy Easy A as a judgmental Christian zealot. She announced an indefinite hiatus from acting shortly after the film was released. In a statement issued around her birthday last year, Esquibias stated that Bynes is doing well, and that “She lives by the beach, attends school and is enjoying meditation and Soul Cycle classes.”
UPDATE, 2/28: Amanda Bynes’ parents, Lynn and Rick Bynes, are “100 percent” supportive of the actor’s motion to remove them as her conservators.
“The parents are happy, thrilled to get this good news,” attorney Tamar Arminak said in a phone interview with NBC News. “The professionals say she is ready to make her own life choices and decisions and are so proud of her. They 100 percent support her decision to end the conservatorship.”