A health care advocate tells PEOPLE that Williams wanted the court to
protect her financially. Now she's protesting her guardianship with
#FreeWendy movement
By Danielle Bacher
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| Wendy Williams speaks onstage during her celebration of 10 years of 'The Wendy Williams Show'.
Photo: Paras Griffin/Getty
|
- Wendy
Williams’ health care advocate Ginalisa Monterroso tells PEOPLE that
the former talk show originally wanted to be in a guardianship despite
her desire to end it now
- Monterroso claims
Williams “passed” the mental capacity exams during her hospital visit on
March 10, adding, “She was alert and oriented, and we were satisfied
with that”
- Williams will hold a protest against her guardianship in New York and Los Angeles on Tuesday, April 1
Wendy Williams
recently amped up her demands to be free of a restrictive guardianship
that she alleges controls every aspect of her life. But her desire to
end it wasn't always this way. Three years ago, Williams allegedly
agreed with the courts to be overseen by her court-appointed legal
guardian Sabrina Morrissey.
Since May 2022, the former TV host, 60, has been living under a legal
guardianship that oversees both her finances and health. Williams is
currently living in a luxury high-rise assisted-living facility in New
York to address her cognitive issues and dementia diagnosis in 2023. Morrissey is the only person who currently has unfettered access to her. Williams' family told PEOPLE last year that she can call them, but they cannot call her themselves.
However, Williams’ health care advocate, Ginalisa Monterroso,
exclusively tells PEOPLE that Williams initially wanted to be placed in
a guardianship with the courts. She claims her client didn't know all
her rights would be taken away — including having no access to the
Internet or a cell phone.
In early 2022, Williams' 24-year-old son Kevin Hunter Jr. and her ex-husband, Kevin Hunter,
were the subjects of public scrutiny when court filings showed that
Wells Fargo froze her accounts after her financial adviser at the time, Lori Schiller, alleged that she was of “unsound mind."
In a letter to the court on Feb. 4, 2022 — and obtained by PEOPLE —
Williams claimed Wells Fargo had "denied [her] any access, whether
online or otherwise, to her financial accounts, assets, and statements"
for more than two weeks.
Hunter Jr.
was Williams' power of attorney and reportedly took a large sum of
money from her account, ultimately raising flags at the bank. The bank
successfully petitioned a New York court to have Williams first placed
under temporary financial guardianship that turned into a full
guardianship under the state laws of New York.
The court documents stated at the time that Wells Fargo had "several million dollars"
of Williams' funds in its possession. The bank, in its filings to the
court, said it froze the funds because "Wells Fargo has strong reason to
believe that [Williams] is the victim of undue influence and financial
exploitation." It did not specify who or what is exploiting or unduly
influencing Williams.
Monterroso now claims that Williams thought that because Wells Fargo
flagged the account — and that it went through the courts — they would
protect her financially. "She wanted to make sure nobody's in her money
and she would be fine," adds Monterroso. "She kind of felt like, 'Hey, I
have the court. They're going to sign me a money person. I'm going to
be good.' In no way did she think that our whole life was going to be
taken away from her."
A month after the guardian was appointed, Williams was caught on camera passed
out at a Louis Vuitton store, drunk. She entered a wellness facility
starting in September 2022 and has been living at another facility in
New York for the past few years.
"A lot of people would be like, 'Well, I would question [the
guardianship] more. But when everything is happening so quickly and the
bank is saying, 'Somebody's trying to take your money and there's
something going on, you're just trying to kind of save yourself," says
Monterroso. "Why would you not trust the courts, right? Why would the
courts become your enemy?"
But under Williams' guardianship, she can no longer decide where to
live, how to spend her money or have a bank account. She can't vote,
marry or decide the doctors she'd like to use or what friends can visit
her at the facility. She has to get special permission from Morrissey
and sometimes even Judge Lisa A. Sokoloff, who is overseeing her
affairs, to travel out of state. "You have no rights," says Monterroso.
"Somebody in prison has more rights than a person put under a
guardianship."
As far as Williams' family petitioning to be her guardian in the
interim, Monterosso says that her client "really didn't want her family
to be involved. She didn't want to kind of burden them with anything,"
she adds.
"How did she go from this aunt or sister that we love and is healthy
one minute to this person who’s in and out of the hospital?” Williams'
sister Wanda Finnie asked in
PEOPLE's February 2024 cover story.
“How is that system better than the system the family could put in
place? I don't know. I do know that this system is broken. I hope that
at some point, Wendy becomes strong enough where she can speak on her
own behalf."
But now Williams has a voice. "Wendy feels as if she has a voice and
change to get out, so she doesn't have to try to get an alternate plan,"
Monterosso continues. "She's able to get counsel, everybody's looking
at the case — and there's movement. People are listening to her now, so
she's confident that she's going to continue to fight."
On Thursday, Jan. 16, Williams was in tears as she begged to get her
out of her guardianship and return to life outside the walls of the
wellness facility in New York City in which she's been ordered to live.
Appearing on The Breakfast Club for a rare interview, she spoke out about her situation to host Charlamagne Tha God.
"I am not cognitively impaired but I feel like I am in prison,"
Williams said. "I’m in this place with people who are in their nineties
and their eighties and their seventies... These people, there's
something wrong with these people here on this floor. I am clearly not."
Two months later, Williams pressed a handwritten note to the window of
her luxury high-rise assisted-living facility that read “Help! Wendy!”
This resulted in police and medical personnel intervening and sending
her in an ambulance for evaluation on March 10. She was then escorted
out of the building, and EMS transported her in an ambulance to a local
hospital “for evaluation,” a spokesperson for the
New York Police Department told PEOPLE at the time.
Monterroso claims that the note was "more of a joke" but that she and
Williams planned the call with 9-1-1 the day before to attract media
attention and get another evaluation for her client. After filing a
complaint with Adult Protective Services earlier this month, Monterroso
says Williams is "excited" for a jury to determine if her guardianship
should be terminated following additional mental competency testing.
"I wanted to make awareness to the public that this is very serious and
it is a crime to keep somebody isolated," Monterroso continues. "And so
I just said [to Wendy] 'We're going to call the police. “It was just
more of a strategic move to just kind of get more evidence because this
case has been stuck,” she explains.
She adds the decision to transport via ambulance was made because they
could “at least do a short mini-assessment” at the hospital and “have
some documentation from somebody else outside of this guardianship that
can attest” to Williams not being incapacitated. Monterroso further
claims Williams “passed” the mental capacity exams at the hospital,
adding, “She was alert and oriented, and we were satisfied with that.”
After the brief hospitalization, Williams went out to dinner
with her niece Alex Finnie
and headed back to her unit wearing a pink fuzzy Versace robe and
waving to onlookers. Although Williams has in no way given up her fight
for more freedom, the police were called after she was reported missing
at her facility. (A police report was filed but Monterroso claims it was
a "misunderstanding").
Investigative journalist Diane Dimond — who released a book about the guardianship system, We’re Here to Help: When Guardianship Goes Wrong, in September 2024 — told PEOPLE last year an estimated 2 million people are presently living under the court's control.
"A guardian can be a family member, it could be your best friend, it could be a perfectly trustworthy commoner, so to speak," Dimond said.
"After investigating this for eight or nine years now, judges are
overlooking family members, they're overlooking friends and they're
going immediately to these professional, for-profit appointees, and
they're complete strangers to these wards of the court. So within that,
the ward of the court loses all their civil rights. They have no more
rights to decide anything about their personal life or their financial
life."
Recently, Williams called into The View, saying she wanted Morrissey to “get off my neck."
"Wendy has expressed her frustration and desire for freedom on multiple
occasions, stating publicly: 'I feel like I’m in prison,' " a source
close to Wendy tells PEOPLE. "No one should feel imprisoned in their own
life — especially not someone who has proven time and again that she is
capable, intelligent, and deserving of dignity. This movement is about
dignity. It’s about voice. And it’s about justice."
Bicoastal rallies for Williams will be held at Coterie Hudson Yards in
New York and the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles at Williams' star
on Tuesday, April 1 beginning at 10:00 a.m. local. A
GoFundMe has also been launched to raise $50,000 to support Williams' legal fight.
The same source says Williams will be cheering supporters from inside the window of her New York facility until 2 p.m. ET.
Full Article & Source:
Wendy Williams Originally Asked for a Guardianship, but Didn't 'Think Her Whole Life Would Be Taken Away' (Exclusive Source)
See Also:
Wendy Williams wants ‘to move on with my life’ despite guardianship: How she got here
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