The former daytime talk show host added, "I am not cognitively impaired," despite being diagnosed with aphasia and frontotemporal dementia.
Wendy Williams called in to The Breakfast Club Thursday morning to speak out against her guardianship.
The former daytime talk show host, who has been under a guardianship since 2022 and was last year diagnosed with aphasia and frontotemporal dementia, said, “I feel like I’m in prison.”
“I am not cognitively impaired, you know what I’m saying? But I feel like I’m in prison,” she added. “I’m in this place where the people are in their 90s and their 80s and their 70s … There’s something wrong with these people here on this floor.”
Breakfast Club host Charlamagne Tha God said Williams was calling in because she was “trapped in a conservatorship” and couldn’t leave her current location.
Williams checked into an unknown facility in April 2023 after being placed under the care of court-appointed caregiver Sabrina Morrissey. Morrissey alleged in late 2022 in a New York court that Williams was of “unsound mind,” leading bank Wells Fargo to petition to have Williams placed under temporary financial guardianship.
Williams, who was the subject of the controversial Lifetime docuseries Where is Wendy Williams? last year, was joined on the show by her niece Alex Finnie, who also called in. Finnie said the facility is high security and, consistent with past reports about Williams being unreachable, added that Williams can only make calls, no one can call her.
“They won’t allow you to leave or have visitors,” she said. “So you can’t even leave and take a walk if you wanted to, or take a trip or visit family members.”
Finnie added, “That’s been the reality since 2023. She’s sitting in that room that she’s sitting in, she’s there every day, all hours of the day, every week, every month, she’s not getting proper sunlight. I went to New York in October to visit her. And the level of security and the level of questions that there were in terms of, ‘Who am I? Why am I here? What’s the purpose?’ I mean, it was absolutely just horrible.”
As for the documentary, Williams said she and Morrissey watched it together and that, “she was the one who wanted to do that.”
She continued, claiming that her situation amounts to “emotional abuse,” “What do I think about being abused? Look, this system is broken, this system that I’m in. This system has falsified a lot.”
Finnie continued to advocate for her aunt, saying she “sounds great.”
“I’ve seen her, in a very limited capacity, but I’ve seen her and we’re talking to her. This does not match an incapacitated person,” Finnie said. “And that’s why we say she’s in a luxury prison, because she is being held and she is being punished for whatever reason that other people are coming up with as to why she has to be kept in this position.”
Williams said her phone had been taken away and that she cannot make purchases and has to have someone get everything for her. She wants to visit her 94-year-old father for his birthday in February but is afraid her guardian won’t let her go.
“At 94, the day after that is not promised,” she said, as her voice grew increasingly emotional.
Finnie, who said the family is afraid Williams will be moved without notice or the ability to contact her, also indicated they were speaking out despite concerns of possible retaliation from Williams’ guardian.
“I said, ‘You know, we do this, you’re ready for what’s on the other side?’ And as she said, ‘I have to do this. There’s nothing else I could do at this point,'” Finnie said. “What you’re hearing now is a few-minute clip of what we’ve been dealing with for the last several months and the last two, three years.”
Morrissey sued to try to prevent the release of the docuseries but a judge dismissed the request, citing the First Amendment. The four-hour-plus project, which aired across two nights on Lifetime, showed Williams’ increasingly fragile state after the June 2022 cancellation of her talk show, documenting her life for the better part of a year as she struggled with family, fame and excessive alcohol consumption.
Filming stopped when she checked into an unknown facility, and Where Is Wendy Williams? producer Mark Ford told The Hollywood Reporter last year, “We were more worried about what would happen if we stopped filming than if we continued.”
At the time, shortly after the doc aired, producers indicated that she hadn’t seen it.
“We simply have had no way to get it to her to see it,” Ford told THR. No way to screen it with her, because she’s locked down in a facility and we haven’t been able to speak to her since we wrapped filming.”
But he added that he and his team had conversations with Williams behind-the-scenes as they were filming about what they wanted to show.
Williams was credited as an executive producer on the project as part of a three-picture deal with Lifetime.
After her initial attempts to block the release of the docuseries, Morrissey, acting in her capacity as Williams’ guardian, sued Lifetime’s parent company A+E Networks in March, saying the contract to shoot the documentary wasn’t valid since Williams didn’t have the legal or mental capacity to authorize her participation in the project and was allegedly told it would be “positive and beneficial” to her image.
In September, a newly revised complaint over the documentary asked that all profits from the project be used to fund Williams’ medical care.
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Wendy Williams Speaks Out Against Guardianship: “I Feel Like I’m in Prison”
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