Charity tells Jamie Lynn Spears to keep her damn money

It seems most of the world has truly decided to shun Britney Spears’s immediate family — even if they’re offering free money. Earlier this Tuesday, the mental health nonprofit This Is My Brave announced it would decline to receive any proceeds from the sales of Jamie Lynn Spears’s upcoming book, Things I Should Have Said.

In an Instagram post earlier in October, Britney’s younger sister announced the release of her new book, a work that she said focused on her “opening up about my own mental health” and “gave me closure on this ‘30 year long’ chapter of my life.” A portion of the book proceeds, she said, would go to This Is My Brave — an organization whose mission, according to its website, “is to empower individuals to put their names and faces on their true stories of recovery from mental illness and addiction.” Since then, a flood of Spears’s supporters and fans have rallied to the organizations’ Instagram page to shame the organization for its support of the younger Spears sister, who many see as complicit in maintaining the conservatorship that essentially shackled Spears for more than a decade and which has, throughout this year, become a major source of public debate and activism.

In response, This Is My Brave posted a message on its Instagram, officially refusing any proceeds in a simple text message: “We hear you,” the post reads. “This Is My Brave was recently recommended to be a beneficiary organization for the proceeds from Jamie Lynn Spears’ upcoming book. We have made the decision to decline the offer of receiving proceeds from the book sales.”

It’s a dramatic move to deny charity (which would likely amount to a decent sum), but also understandable: It would be appalling for a mental health organization to receive money from someone directly implicated in one of the most publicly toxic and malicious exploitations of an individual, perpetrated specifically in the name of protecting Spears’s mental health, in recent memory.

Britney has been relatively direct in casting her sister as an accomplice in her conservatorship. Earlier this past summer, after Jamie Lynn posted on her Instagram stories a vague defense of herself and claimed she was supportive of Britney “long before there was a hashtag,” the elder sister wrote in the caption of a now-deleted post: “How dare the people you love the most say anything at all … did they even put a hand out to even lift me up at the TIME !!!??? How dare you make it public that NOW you CARE … did you put your hand out when I was drowning ???? Again … NO.”

Jamie Lynn’s book may attempt to set the record straight on some things — undoubtedly, her part in this entire saga is more complicated than what we know, nor do we know the extent of the damage that she herself has shouldered as a child star growing up in the same family. Yet it’s high time that her and those around Britney Spears were confronted with what they allowed to happen. Jamie Lynn wanted to make the donation, she wrote in her post, “because I know how scary it can be to share personal struggles, especially if you don’t feel you have the support or a safe space to do so.” Under those circumstances, her own sister ought to come to mind first.