As with most stories regarding celebrity conservatorships, Wendy Williams‘s is long, complex, and often quite dark. From the outside, it is impossible to know the objective truth of the situation, even though much of it has played out in public.
The Wendy Williams Show first premiered in 2008, but Williams, now 60, was well-known for her famously filter-free pop culture commentary long before that. The show ran until 2022, when it was canceled amidst Williams’s physical and mental health struggles, which had become public the year before. Now, Williams is under a conservatory similar to the one Britney Spears lived under, but, like Spears, she says she is being unjustly imprisoned by the legal arrangement.
To take a closer look, here is a timeline of Wendy Williams’s health struggles and conservatorship controversy, with most recent events first.
February 13, 2025: In a new interview for IMPACT x Nightline: What’s Happening with Wendy Williams? she again criticizes the care facility where she has been living.
Williams says that the floor she lives on is called the “memory unit” and adds “the people who live here don’t remember anything.”
For the second time, she denies that she has dementia. “Frontotemporal dementia? Uh, how dare you?” she tells Nightline. “No. That’s what I’ve been accused of, believe it or not. Look, I don’t belong here at all. This is ridiculous.”
January 2025: Williams appears on an episode of The Breakfast Club, where she says that she does not have dementia.
“I am not cognitively impaired,” she says, per the New York Times. “But I feel like I am in prison.” Williams also criticizes the New York-based care facility where she has been living. “Look, I have breakfast, lunch, and dinner right here on the bed,” she says. “I watch TV, I listen to radio, I look at the window, I talk on the phone.” She also complains of isolation, and says she doesn’t belong with the other people on her floor, some of whom, she adds, are in their nineties. “I would rather spend my birthday by myself than open the door and spend my birthday with these people on this floor,” she says.
Williams’s niece, Alex Finnie, also phones into the show to request better treatment for her aunt. “All I’m saying is just treat the woman with dignity and give her the freedoms that she deserves,” Finnie pleads.
November 2024: Williams’s guardian Sabrina Morrissey claims in court filings that Williams has been “permanently incapacitated” by early onset dementia and is cognitively impaired.
In the same filing, Morrissey and her team claim that Lifetime and Where Is Wendy Williams? executive producer Mark Ford “cruelly took advantage of Williams’s cognitive and physical decline by creating and publishing a documentary at a time when Williams was highly vulnerable and clearly incapable of consenting to be filmed.”
Morrissey’s team also claims that the docuseries creators “intentionally manipulated and goaded” Williams “to trigger strong emotional reactions and acquire embarrassing footage.”
Lifetime says they received “consent, input, and cooperation” from Williams.
February 24, 2024: Lifetime releases Where Is Wendy Williams?, a four-part docuseries chronicling the TV hosts whereabouts since the cancelation of her show. Variety’s review of the series called it “unsettling and exploitative.”
“This docuseries feels invasive at best and predatory at worst,” writes Aramide Tinubu for Variety.
February 22, 2024: Williams’s team reveals in a press statement that the talkshow host was diagnosed with aphasia and frontotemporal dementia, according to NPR. “Most importantly, she maintains her trademark sense of humor and is receiving the care she requires to make sure she is protected and that her needs are addressed,” the statement reads of Williams’ current state.
Read moreWendy Williams Has Been Diagnosed With Aphasia and Dementia
The former talk show host’s team confirmed the news with a press release.
August 2022: The Hollywood Reporter publishes a bombshell account of the last days of The Wendy Williams Show. According to execs speaking to the paper, Williams had to be reminded several times that her show had been canceled.
July 2022: Fans are dismayed and a little alarmed to discover that The Wendy Williams Show appears to have been removed from YouTube and Instagram, per Entertainment Weekly.
May 2022: Williams is placed under a financial guardianship, per Hollywood Reporter.
March 2022: Williams takes to Instagram to accuse Wells Fargo of freezing her accounts and petitioning for a guardianship against her will, per NBC. “Lori Schiller and Wells Fargo have this guardianship petition about keeping me away from my money,” she said in a video.
February 22, 2022: The Wendy Williams Show is officially canceled, with Sherri Shepherd slated to take over the time slot with her own eponymous talk show, Sherri.
October 18, 2021: The thirteenth season of The Wendy Williams Show premieres without Williams present. While the show’s guest hosts do not mention the reason for Williams’s absence on air, it is later reported that Williams was recovering from a breakthrough case of COVID-19, and had been taken to the hospital for a mental health evaluation, according to Page Six.
March 19, 2019: Williams reveals on her show that she has been staying at a sober living house, per Variety. “I see my brothers and sisters caught up their addiction and looking for help,” she said. “They don’t know I’m Wendy. They don’t care I’m Wendy. There’s no autographs, there’s no nothing.”
2018: In 2018, Williams takes her first extended hiatus from The Wendy Williams Show for a period of three weeks. At the time, Williams explained that her absence was due to Graves disease. “We take care of everybody but ourselves and it’s really unfortunate,” she told Good Morning America. “I’m not doing that anymore. Wendy first.”
However, according to the 2024 docu-series Where Is Wendy Williams?, this is allegedly the time during which Williams began abusing alcohol.
This post will be updated.
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