Spears: Own up

Los Angeles, Aug. 10 (AP): The owner of a parked Mercedes-Benz that was damaged when Britney Spears smashed her car into it said she only found out about the incident after it was caught on camera by paparazzi.

Kim Robard-Rifkin, 59, told the entertainment website CelebTV.com on Wednesday that nobody from Spears’s camp had contacted her about the damaged car.

“It’s sad because I was really hoping she’d step up and be a mensch, be a human being,” Robard-Rifkin said. “It was simply like my car didn’t matter to her, my inconvenience didn’t matter to her.”

A video on CelebTV.com, taken on Monday, shows the 25-year-old pop star — with a puppy on her lap — attempting to pull her black convertible into an empty parking space when she hit the adjacent car.

Robard-Rifkin, a registered nurse, said she was “sort of amused and sort of shocked” when she learned it was Spears who hit her car and figured she would hear from the embattled entertainer.

“There were obviously a lot of paparazzi there and what kind of person wouldn’t realise that this (would) be on TV and she had to be responsible and contact me,” she said.

“I’m not asking for money. I’m not asking for a new car... I simply want my car fixed, the same as I would fix somebody’s car if I had done that.”

Robard-Rifkin filed a police report yesterday.

An email to Spears’s spokesperson at Jive Records was not immediately returned.

Spears’s divorce from Kevin Federline became official on July 30. Since February, Spears and Federline, 29, have shared joint custody of their sons, 22-month-old Sean Preston and 10-month-old Jayden James. When the divorce was finalised, a child custody hearing was scheduled for August 14.