A neurologist has reportedly determined that Wendy Williams does not have frontotemporal dementia. On Tuesday, TMZ reported that Williams, who was diagnosed with the brain disorder in 2024, received a “battery of tests” from an unnamed “top neurologist” in New York who concluded that the former talk-show host does not have the condition that’s kept her in a guardianship for years.
Williams has been living under a court-appointed guardianship since 2022, when her bank declared she was incapable of managing her own financial affairs and at risk of exploitation. In 2024, representatives for Williams announced that she had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, which the Mayo Clinic describes as “an umbrella term for a group of brain diseases that mainly affect the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain,” which are “associated with personality, behavior, and language.” The diagnosis, which Williams has consistently denied, is one of the reasons her guardianship has been upheld.
In August, People reported that Williams’s diagnosis had been upheld after a new round of evaluations that included a “significant number of tests (both medical and neuropsychological) and scans (including brain imaging).” At some point since then, TMZ claims, she was tested again, and her doctor provided her lawyers with her new results late last month. The outlet reported that her legal team plans to bring this new information to court within the next two weeks. They seem to hope this will pave the way for a hearing in which they can ask a judge to terminate Williams’s guardianship.
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TMZ reported that, if a judge does not want to end the guardianship, powerhouse celebrity attorney Joe Tacopina — who has been speaking on Williams’s behalf lately — will ask for a jury trial. As The Cut reported last month, Tacopina does not officially represent Williams in her guardianship proceedings, and the court does not recognize him as her lawyer.
Over the past year, Williams has been vocal about wanting to be released from her guardianship. In a TMZ documentary released in February, she bemoaned living on the memory-care floor of an assisted-living facility; a few weeks later, she told Charlamagne tha God that she passed two different psychological evaluations at the hospital. While heading into a restaurant this summer during one of her rare outings, she asked a “Page Six” reporter, “Do I sound like I have dementia to you?” Most recently, she made several appearances during New York Fashion Week, where she told the paparazzi that she felt “like a zillion dollars.”
