Wendy Williams is making moves to be released from her court-ordered guardianship. The former talk-show host reportedly signed an affidavit on Wednesday asking a judge to release her from the guardianship, claiming that she has “regained capacity” to be in charge of her own life with the help of family members, a sober coach, and professional financial advisers. This news comes via TMZ, which released a documentary earlier this week called TMZ Presents: Saving Wendy.
In the doc, TMZ founder Harvey Levin interviews Williams over the phone while a camera crew on the street films her standing in the fifth-floor window of her assisted-living facility. Williams said that she has been living in the facility for “six or seven months,” and that she has only been allowed to leave twice in the last 30 days.
Williams’s guardianship, which began in 2022 when her bank expressed concern that she was being exploited financially, became public last year thanks to Lifetime’s documentary Where Is Wendy Williams? Ahead of the doc’s release, her family revealed that she had been diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia and frontotemporal dementia, and that she was living in a care facility. Around the same time, Williams’s family went public with their concerns about Williams’s life under a court-appointed guardian, who reportedly tried to block the Lifetime doc’s release. Ultimately, Where Is Wendy Williams?, which was shot between August 2022 and April 2023, depicted a visibly unwell Williams who was often under the influence of alcohol and struggled to hold coherent conversations.
The TMZ documentary presents a very different picture of Williams today, who appears sober, focused, and well aware of her surroundings. She initially disputed that she’d been exploited financially by her son, Kevin Hunter Jr., but acknowledged from her facility that he “overstepped his boundaries and he was inappropriately using my money without telling me crap about it.”
According to TMZ, Williams also wants to revisit her diagnosis — she reportedly claimed in her affidavit that she does not have frontotemporal dementia. “In terms of how I feel, health-wise, I feel fantastic. I’m not incapacitated,” Williams told Levin. While frontotemporal dementia is a degenerative neurological condition, the documentary posits that she never had it to begin with. (One neurologist who’s interviewed, Dr. Leah Croll, theorizes that she could have alcohol-related brain damage instead, which is possible to recover from if you stop drinking.)
A source told TMZ that Williams is being reevaluated by a doctor next week. After the evaluation, her lawyer intends to file a petition that would once again raise the issue of Williams’s guardianship with the judge overseeing the case.
