Just when everyone thought that things couldn’t get any worse for Wendy Williams, more tragic news came out about her condition and her life. Ever since her diagnosis in 2023, her health has sadly been declining faster and faster.
And on top of that, she’s also caught up in the legal drama of her guardian and the company that produced the docuseries about her life earlier this year.
The Rise of Wendy Williams
She made her name as a radio host personality in the 90s and then became the daytime talk show queen we all know and love, with The Wendy Williams Show running for 14 years. Sadly, the show was taken off the air after she was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.
Tragic Diagnosis
FTD is a progressive disease, meaning that there is no cure and the symptoms only get worse over time. It’s also the same condition that Bruce Willis has. The latest news on Wendy’s health is that she’s never been worse. That’s according to her court-appointed guardian, Sabrina E. Morrissey.
In documents that PEOPLE recently got a hold of, Sabrina claimed that Wendy had become cognitively impaired, permanently disabled, and legally incapacitated. PR Newswire reported that her care team released a press release in February 2024 where they claimed that she was still able to do many things for herself. Just less than a year later, she is supposedly impaired and disabled.
Health Update
The latest update on her health was not something that Sabrina deliberately shared with the public. She included the claim in the lawsuit she filed against A&E Television Networks. Sabrina alleged that the people involved in the creation of the docuseries cruelly took advantage of Wendy’s cognitive and physical decline by creating and publishing a documentary at a time when she was highly vulnerable and incapable of consenting to be filmed.
The court documents also stated that Sabrina filed the case because of the brutally calculated, deliberate actions of powerful and opportunistic media companies that were all working together with a producer to knowingly exploit Wendy. Sabrina made the argument that Wendy was in a highly vulnerable state when she was being recorded.
She claimed that Wendy was clearly incapable of consenting to being filmed, much less humiliated and exploited. Her legal team said that the production team even intentionally manipulated and provoked Wendy to trigger strong emotional reactions so that they could get embarrassing footage.
Wendy’s Decline
She went on to allege that the people working for A&E and Lifetime filmed Wendy without a valid contract, and they supposedly released the docuseries without Sabrina’s consent, too. In the filing, the court-appointed guardian also made some demands that she wanted to be approved by the court.
She asked that it redact some parts of the lawsuit which involved Wendy’s health, her financial status, and her family members. Her reasoning was that she wanted Wendy’s privacy and dignity to be protected from the public.
After Sabrina filed her lawsuit, A&E filed a counterclaim against her. They made the claim that no one ever attempted to stop production of the docuseries. Not Sabrina, not Wendy, nor anyone else on her team. They said that nobody ever made an attempt to terminate the talent agreement, and no one tried to argue at the time that Wendy’s signature on the talent agreement was fake. The company released a statement alleging that Wendy’s manager, Will Selby, saw the docuseries and its trailer before they aired, and he showed enthusiastic support.
Wendy’s Family
And it wasn’t just Wendy’s management that reportedly approved of the docuseries. The statement claimed that her family members also watched Where is Wendy Williams? before it aired and expressed support for its release. And they even sat for press interviews in connection to its release.
A report by Radar Online revealed that the network’s legal team turned things around on Sabrina. They made the argument that she only filed the lawsuit to try and “excuse her own failure to protect her ward.” They went on to allege that Sabrina misused her position as a guardian to silence criticism of her controversial and failed administration of Wendy’s guardianship.
The production team said that they’d gotten Wendy’s consent, input, and participation to make the docuseries before she was diagnosed with dementia and before she even had a guardian. In the court documents, the lawyers also accused Sabrina of interfering with the exercise of free speech rights.
In their lawsuit, A&E argued that Where is Wendy Williams? showed how the system that was put into place to protect and help Wendy was actually doing the opposite. They claimed that because of the guardianship, she’d been cut off from her family and left alone most of the time in her apartment, which had made her self-destructive behavior even worse.
Heartbreaking News
They pointed out that her problems with addiction had also gotten worse since she was put under Sabrina’s care. A New York Post article talked about how Wendy has struggled with drinking and taking illegal substances.
She’s reportedly been in and out of a number of rehab centers in the last few years, and the documentary even included scenes that showed how bad her drinking had gotten.
No matter what, everyone can agree that this news is heartbreaking for our beloved Wendy.
