Former actress Amanda Bynes filed to end a conservatorship this week nearly a decade after a court established the legal arrangement giving her parents full control of her personal and financial affairs.
The onetime Nickelodeon star, 35, filed her request with California’s Ventura County Superior Court on Wednesday, court records show. Page Six was the first to report the news, and her attorney later gave a statement to People.
“Amanda wishes to terminate her conservatorship,” her lawyer, David A. Esquibias, said. “She believes her condition is improved and protection of the court is no longer necessary.”
A hearing for her request is scheduled for March 22.
Tamar Arminak, an attorney for Bynes’ parents, told “Today” they support their daughter’s desire to take back control of her life and finances.
“The parents are happy, thrilled to get this good news,” she said. “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.”
Bynes, whose last acting role was in 2010’s “Easy A,” was first placed under her parents’ temporary conservatorship in 2013 after starting a small fire in a neighbor’s driveway in Ventura County’s Thousand Oaks and being hospitalized for a 72-hour mental health evaluation hold. The incident followed a year of erratic behavior by Bynes, who was charged at the time for driving under the influence and reckless endangerment, though the charges were later dropped.
That temporary conservatorship lapsed until her mother, Lynn Bynes, secured another one in 2014. At the time, Bynes made several concerning comments on social media, including accusations that her father, Rick Bynes, had sexually and emotionally abused her. But the “Amanda Show” star later changed course, and said of her father: “The microchip in my brain made me say those things but he’s the one that ordered them to microchip me.”
Bynes, who’d been dogged by paparazzi throughout her ordeal, shared on Twitter a month later that she had been diagnosed with bipolar and manic depressive disorders and was doing well with medication and the help of a psychiatrist and psychologist.
In 2018, she gave a lengthy interview to Paper Magazine and shared that she was under the influence of several drugs during her struggles years earlier, citing abuse of Adderall, MDMA, cocaine and marijuana.
“I’m really ashamed and embarrassed with the things I said,” she commented. “I can’t turn back time but if I could, I would. And I’m so sorry to whoever I hurt and whoever I lied about because it truly eats away at me.”
The drug use was coupled with “a deep depression” she entered for months due to being unhappy with her appearance on-screen, she added, prompting her to announce her retirement from acting.
Bynes graduated in 2019 at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, which she attended with plans to establish a career in product merchandising.
She largely stayed off social media until 2020, when she returned with news of an engagement and a pregnancy, but her lawyer later said the latter was not true.