Wendy Williams, Her Guardian, and the Age of the Celebrity Conservatorship

Harvey Levin, the TMZ founder, was seated at the outlet’s headquarters in Los Angeles. Wendy Williams, the former daytime talk show host, was in Manhattan, looking out from a fifth-floor window of an assisted living facility. On the sidewalk, a camera streamed a feed of Williams to Levin. She gripped a phone with one hand and, as she made her latest pleas for freedom, pressed the other against the glass for emphasis.

The conversation between two of celebrity gossip’s most accomplished personalities constituted the throughline of TMZ Presents: Saving Wendy, an hour-long special released in February. It is an unsettling document defined by Williams’s face of tearful despair, and, in some other sense, a testament to each party’s capacity for spectacle. “I feel wonderful and fabulous,” Williams tells Levin. As the interview concludes, Levin addresses and empowers the audience, saying, “You don’t have to be a doctor or judge to take a stand.”

Williams rose to the highest rungs of her field as a bawdy and unabashed chronicler of starry turmoil. Her steady penchant for conflict saw her clashing with the likes of Diddy, Mariah Carey, and Whitney Houston, and to a degree, it made her one of them. Williams’s recent health issues, as well as claims of her substance abuse and her ex-husband’s infidelity surrounding the 2020 dissolution of her 21-year marriage, have often played as tabloid fodder.

When The Wendy Williams Show ended after a 14-year run in 2022, its conclusion was eclipsed by the murky circumstances surrounding it. After her bank claimed that year that Williams, now 60, was incapacitated, describing her as a “victim of undue influence and financial exploitation,” she was placed under a court-ordered conservatorship. In 2024, her team announced that she had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia and aphasia. In recent months, across a growing series of media appearances, including interviews with The Breakfast Club and Don Lemon, Williams has denied having dementia and said that she feels like a prisoner. She told Levin that her two cats were gone and that she was only allowed to leave the building twice in the last month.

Conservatorship, historically a semi-esoteric legal practice, has gained considerable traction in the pop culture vernacular in recent years. Framing Britney Spears, the 2021 New York Times/FX documentary, turned the pop star’s long-running battle to exit a court-ordered guardianship run by her father into a global media phenomenon, and created a template for understanding other celebrities’ struggles for autonomy. On her show that year, Williams herself went so far as to wish death on Spears’s parents for the trauma described by the singer—the clip was cut from future airings. “Is Free Amanda Bynes the New #FreeBritney?” the Daily Beast asked as scrutiny of the former child star’s own conservatorship began to mount.

Four years later, with less fame and novelty in the backdrop, the #FreeWendy movement has been more sporadic, powered by a scattering of social media pages and a recent GoFundMe campaign. But as with Spears’s father Jamie, there has been an identifiable face for the opposition.

Sabrina Morrissey is an elder-law attorney whom a Manhattan court appointed to oversee Williams’s welfare and finances. She began working on guardianship cases about 20 years ago, and Williams’s is one of 24 she is currently managing. Conservatorships can naturally entail a measure of conflict, especially in instances such as Williams’s, when a court appoints a guardian in lieu of a family member or against family members’ wishes. Williams’s 24-year-old son had initially sought to be appointed, and, along with Williams’s sister and niece, has since condemned Morrissey’s handling of the case. Williams told TMZ that it was her son’s overspending that triggered her bank to seek a conservatorship. (He has denied the allegation.)

Williams’s public complaints against Morrissey have brought additional complications. Morrissey has largely tried to filter out thousands of outraged emails and one-star Google reviews, she told me during a recent interview, but when Williams herself is the messenger, she has some level of obligation to tune in. Hours after Williams contested her dementia diagnosis in a February interview, Morrissey requested a new medical evaluation.

Morrissey sought to block the release of the 2024 Lifetime documentary Where Is Wendy Williams?, and she and the network are currently suing each other. Morrissey claims that the four-part series exploited its subject’s erratic behavior and drinking. The network accuses her of trying to “silence criticism of her controversial and failed administration.” Each party denies the other’s allegations, and Morrissey has said she has “no interest” in pursuing her suit “in the extremely unlikely event” that the new examination finds that Williams has the mental capacity to oversee it. (The judge has granted a three-month stay pending the medical evaluation.)

The judge in Williams’s conservatorship case, Morrissey said, recently granted her a limited exemption to a broad sealing order for the purpose of clarifying the record following Williams’s claims about her and other allegations made on social media and in the press. When we spoke, Morrissey had a crisis communications professional and her own lawyer on the line as she tried to clear up an emerging narrative.

“Nobody’s saying that Wendy can’t leave a building,” Morrissey said, citing Williams’s two recent trips to Florida for her son’s college graduation and her father’s 94th birthday. “But that has become a thread that people pick up on.”

According to Morrissey, Williams’s cats were a bonded pair of siblings who were rehomed amid Williams’s moves between medical facilities. Williams’s current building only allows one cat per resident. Morrissey said that Williams didn’t want to split the pair, and that, when presented with an option to get a new single cat, she declined.

Williams was diagnosed by doctors at Weill Cornell Medical Center, according to one of Morrissey’s court filings, and ruled incapacitated by a judge. In general, Morrissey described her work in terms of its adherence to court orders, explaining that Williams’s living arrangements and level of care have flowed from medical recommendations. “It’s not something that I decided,” she said.

Despite the press appearances, Morrissey said Williams hasn’t seemed angry with her when they talk. They had spoken the night before our interview, and Morrissey said that they typically see each other a few times a month. She was even but firm about how she had been conducting her job and, under the circumstances, only intermittently defensive. She said that, in addition to showing that Williams hasn’t been emotionally abused, she felt compelled to address a more sweeping disparagement of the system in which she works—one that revolves, she noted, around difficult circumstances and decisions.

On the whole, Morrissey said, guardianships are often misunderstood. In her view, the aim is to maximize a person’s ability to make choices, at least within the boundaries of safety and bureaucratic constraint. “I had one woman who all she wanted to do is listen to Frank Sinatra,” she remembered. “If she said to me, I’m going to stand here and jump out the window, we wouldn’t let her do that.”

As the push to support Spears escalated, culminating in the end of her conservatorship in late 2021, advocates saw an opportunity for a broader reevaluation of guardianship practices. The director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Disability Rights Program, Zoe Brennan-Krohn, believes the mechanism should only be used as an absolute last resort, and wondered if any less restrictive options had been tried in Williams’s case.

Even if a guardian “started with the best of intentions,” Brennan-Krohn said, “it is very hard to come back from the real harm to your personhood that people feel when they are told it doesn’t matter what you want.”

Healthcare attorney Harry Nelson has worked with several prescribing doctors whose celebrity patients died of opioid overdoses, including Michael Jackson and Prince. He said that observers of Williams’s case would be right to be troubled by what they’re seeing and hearing, and he identified what he sees as fundamental issues with the care relationships formed out of conservatorships.

“There’s an aspect of self-preservation and guardians inherently become conservators of their own.” Nelson said. “Obviously you don’t accept the responsibility without believing that you’re in an essential role.”

The most restrictive forms of guardianship, he added, tend to be the most straightforward for the conservator. “The safest way to prevent Wendy Williams from self-harm or from financial abuse is just to cut her off and effectively restrain her from doing anything.”

Like Spears’s and Bynes’s fans, Williams’s most devout acolytes have been studying the conversation around guardianships. Jarrius Adams, a 27-year-old Washington, DC–based attorney focused on voting rights, runs a small account on X, @FreeWendy2025, aimed at raising awareness about what he described to me as Morrissey’s failings.

Adams grew up watching The Wendy Williams Show, and in recent years, he said, “I realized that we’re seeing the exact same thing that happened to people who a lot of supporters got behind,” including Spears. He believes that Morrissey is retaliating against Williams for her outspokenness. While he and like-minded observers have not yet organized protests, he thought a tipping point could arrive with the recent uptick of attention.

Morrissey is white, and online backlash has sometimes emphasized the racial dynamic between her and a highly visible Black woman in her care. Adams specified that Morrissey’s behavior was not in keeping with the tenets that he learned at Howard University.

“I went to law school to help people and not take advantage of them,” Adams said. “When I think of Sabrina Morrissey, I think of people who are the opposite of me.”

“Can she speak?” Morrissey said, responding to some of the social media and tabloid chatter that highlighted Williams’s interview performances. “Yes, she’s a professional speaker.”

“But when I speak to her, and it’s not scripted and it’s not repetitive, do I see issues with her speech? Yes, I do, but the public isn’t having conversations with her the way I do.”

When she was assigned the case, Morrissey didn’t know much about Williams or the news surrounding her health decline. She said she wasn’t very familiar with Spears’s case either, and that her day-to-day work hadn’t changed in its aftermath. While she could imagine general instances of exploitation within the conservatorship structure, she said she’d have nothing to gain from restricting Williams’s movements, and that, given the level of judicial oversight, “If you wanted to take money or do something that wasn’t legal or proper, a guardianship would be the absolute wrong place to do it.”

Morrissey enjoys the practical and interpersonal challenges that accompany cases such as Williams’s. “As a guardian, you are a fiduciary,” she said. “I can’t let whatever happens in the public affect how I respond to her and how I continue to help her.”

Richard Seeger is a thrift store cashier in a suburb of Detroit. He has a degree in criminal justice, he told me, and alongside “#FreeWendy,” his bio on X includes American, pride, Israeli, and Ukrainian flags. He has designs on becoming a streamer and asked if I could include his handle, @Lion2Ya, in this story.

Seeger wasn’t sure that there was a villain in Williams’s case, apart from perhaps the law itself. “I understand that [Morrissey] is the lady who was court appointed and my notion is that maybe it’s kind of a hands-off approach,” he said, but he was also “getting the sense that maybe she isn’t fully within Wendy’s best interest.”

Another onlooker I spoke to struck a similarly ambivalent note. Valerie Connolly, a 43-year-old stay-at-home mother, grew up in Yonkers and, while not a hardcore fan, became familiar with Williams in her pre-television days as a New York City shock jock. She closely followed A$AP Rocky’s and Young Thug’s recent trials and views Williams’s case in the same vein of celebrity-justice matters.

Above all, Connolly found the situation sad. She also wanted to know more, and started poking around after Williams spoke out about her distress, even if the answers have been somewhat lacking. “There’s bits and pieces of it that I don’t understand completely,” Connolly said. “Maybe you’re never really going to know the why for certain things.”