By Jill Serjeant

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The parents of Britney Spears on Wednesday accused popular television therapist Dr. Phil McGraw of betraying their trust by publicizing his visit to the troubled pop star while she was hospitalized last week.

As her parents spoke out, reports swirled that Spear’s latest boyfriend — a paparazzi — was trying to sell semi-nude pictures of the singer.

A spokeswoman for the Spears family told NBC’s “Today” show the star’s parents had asked McGraw to visit her in a hospital last week as a private favor when she was admitted after refusing, in a fit of hysterics, to hand back her two children to ex-husband Kevin Federline.

“The family basically extended an invitation of trust as a resource to support them, not to make a public statement,” Lou Taylor, the business manager for Lynne and Jamie Spears, told “Today” in an interview.

McGraw issued a statement Saturday saying Spears, 26, was “in dire need of medical and psychological intervention.” He later scrapped plans for a special on “The Dr. Phil Show” about Spears and her problems after criticism from other counselors.

Spears spent almost two days in a Los Angeles hospital after being taken from her home on a stretcher after a standoff with police. News reports said she locked herself in a bathroom and became hysterical when Federline’s representatives came to pick up their two young sons after a visit.

Spears’ life has careened out of control since she divorced Federline in 2006. She lost custody of the boys last year.

McGraw has remained defiant. “Somebody needs to step up and provide a vector to get this young woman into some quality care,” he told celebrity TV show Entertainment Tonight

 Ever since Jamie Lynn Spears announced her pregnancy, the rumor mill has been hard at work. The 16-year-old “Zoey 101″ star is only three weeks along — no, wait, she’s further along. She’s still with the father — she’s broken up with him. She’s got the support of her parents — she’s going it alone. So without a further announcement from the youngest Spears, what are her fans to believe? Well, the publication she originally honored with her announcement, OK! Magazine, has an update chock-full of unnamed sources and “insiders.” Not surprisingly, considering the magazine’s track record of giving celebrities the coverage they most desire, it’s a pretty squeaky-clean update.

For starters, OK!’s sources — who claim to be close to the Spears family — say the teen’s parental units are all aboard. “Jamie Lynn and her mom will be raising this baby together,” one unnamed source claimed. “Jamie Lynn loves her mom dearly. She thinks Lynne has been a sensational mom, and anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” Some of those same critics had found it troubling that Lynne Spears gave the story of Jamie Lynn’s pregnancy to OK! in the first place.

Her story isn’t new, but it does have a few twists.

By Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 31, 2007

This much, at least, is certain: Jamie Lynn Spears, the 16-year-old star of the Nickelodeon series “Zoey 101,” is pregnant. (Or the British tabloid OK!, which paid a reported $1 million to announce the fact, will be wanting its money back.) As to just when and with whom, rumors keep arising to buffet what were yesterday asserted as facts. It is a fluid story whose meaning keeps changing as new grist is poured into the gossips’ mill.

There are a lot of pregnant teenagers in this country — more than in any other developed nation — and many more are having sex and not getting pregnant, of course, or getting anyone pregnant. In that context, Spears’ situation is regrettable but not unusual and, almost by definition, not unnatural. You will decide for yourself whether it is immoral or whether it is your business to decide that at all.

But Jamie Lynn Spears is also a teenager on a hit television show — as of November, the No. 1 series among viewers 9 to 14 — and the sister of Britney Spears, whose capacity for calamity is matched only by everyone else’s desire to read about it; with her sister and her manager-mother, Lynne Spears, she’s part of the larger, strange story of a family that, from a distance, seems remarkably oblivious to its own dysfunction. And although she is surely not the only sexually active teenage tween idol, she’s the one who’s having a baby.

Even in this she is not quite unique. In October 2006, New Zealand actress Keisha Castle-Hughes, then 16 and Oscar-nominated three years earlier for “Whale Rider,” announced that she was pregnant. (She had just finished playing the Virgin Mary in “The Nativity Story,” appropriately.) Castle-Hughes declared herself to be happy, had her baby and went back to work. But Spears is a different sort of actress — she’s more of a brand in a franchised world, inseparable from the single role she’s played for the last three years and from all the young heads in which she and Zoey live intermingled.

The father of Jamie-Lynn Spears’ baby is not Casey Aldridge, but an older man who could face rape charges over the conception, according to new U.s. reports. American magazine Star claims the Spears family are paying Aldridge, 18, to play dad in a bid to mask the father’s true identity and avoid the shame of an under-age sex scandal involving 16-year-old Jamie-Lynn.

The reports come days after Jamie-Lynn confirmed she is 12-weeks pregnant with student Aldridge’s baby during an interview with Ok! magazine.

According to celebrity blogger Perez Hilton’s website, a Star source is reported as saying, “Casey is being paid off to be the family’s fall guy while the real father remains unidentified.

“The man many suspect is the father, however, would face charges and probably prison time if he were to come forward and admit he had sex with her.”

Star magazine quotes “two separate Spears family insiders” who believe the father is someone who works on Jamie-Lynn’s kids’ TV show, Zoey 101.

The source adds, “In Hollywood, little girls grow up fast, and she is no exception. With everything that has gone on in her family, she needed someone to look up to. But the man she found seems to have completely taken advantage of her.”

In Jamie-Lynn’s state of Louisiana, Aldridge would escape legal action because a 16-year-old can legally have sex with a person less than two years older.