Until she was assigned her most vocal charge in a post–#FreeBritney
world, elder-law attorney Sabrina Morrissey worked in anonymity.
By Dan Adler
Harvey Levin, the TMZ founder, was seated at the outlet’s headquarters in Los Angeles. Wendy Williams,
the former daytime talk show host, was in Manhattan, looking out from a
fifth-floor window of an assisted living facility. On the sidewalk, a
camera streamed a feed of Williams to Levin. She gripped a phone with
one hand and, as she made her latest pleas for freedom, pressed the
other against the glass for emphasis.
The conversation between two of celebrity gossip’s most accomplished personalities constituted the throughline of TMZ Presents: Saving Wendy,
an hour-long special released in February. It is an unsettling document
defined by Williams’s face of tearful despair, and, in some other
sense, a testament to each party’s capacity for spectacle. “I feel
wonderful and fabulous,” Williams tells Levin. As the interview
concludes, Levin addresses and empowers the audience, saying, “You don’t
have to be a doctor or judge to take a stand.”
Williams
rose to the highest rungs of her field as a bawdy and unabashed
chronicler of starry turmoil. Her steady penchant for conflict saw her
clashing with the likes of Diddy, Mariah Carey, and
Whitney Houston, and to a degree, it made her one of them. Williams’s
recent health issues, as well as claims of her substance abuse and her
ex-husband’s infidelity surrounding the 2020 dissolution of her 21-year
marriage, have often played as tabloid fodder.
When The Wendy Williams Show ended after a
14-year run in 2022, its conclusion was eclipsed by the murky
circumstances surrounding it. After her bank claimed that year that
Williams, now 60, was incapacitated, describing her as a “victim of
undue influence and financial exploitation,” she was placed under a
court-ordered conservatorship. In 2024, her team announced that she had
been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia and aphasia. In recent
months, across a growing series of media appearances, including interviews with The Breakfast Club and Don Lemon,
Williams has denied having dementia and said that she feels like a
prisoner. She told Levin that her two cats were gone and that she was
only allowed to leave the building twice in the last month.
Conservatorship,
historically a semi-esoteric legal practice, has gained considerable
traction in the pop culture vernacular in recent years. Framing Britney Spears, the 2021 New York Times/FX
documentary, turned the pop star’s long-running battle to exit a
court-ordered guardianship run by her father into a global media
phenomenon, and created a template for understanding other celebrities’
struggles for autonomy. On her show that year, Williams herself went so
far as to wish death on Spears’s parents for the trauma described by the
singer—the clip was cut from future airings. “Is Free Amanda Bynes the
New #FreeBritney?” the Daily Beast asked as scrutiny of the former child
star’s own conservatorship began to mount.
Four years later, with less fame and novelty in the
backdrop, the #FreeWendy movement has been more sporadic, powered by a
scattering of social media pages and a recent GoFundMe campaign. But as
with Spears’s father Jamie, there has been an identifiable face for the opposition.
Sabrina Morrissey
is an elder-law attorney whom a Manhattan court appointed to oversee
Williams’s welfare and finances. She began working on guardianship cases
about 20 years ago, and Williams’s is one of 24 she is currently
managing. Conservatorships can naturally entail a measure of conflict,
especially in instances such as Williams’s, when a court appoints a
guardian in lieu of a family member or against family members’ wishes.
Williams’s 24-year-old son had initially sought to be appointed, and,
along with Williams’s sister and niece, has since condemned Morrissey’s
handling of the case. Williams told TMZ that it was her son’s
overspending that triggered her bank to seek a conservatorship. (He has
denied the allegation.)
Williams’s public
complaints against Morrissey have brought additional complications.
Morrissey has largely tried to filter out thousands of outraged emails
and one-star Google reviews, she told me during a recent interview, but
when Williams herself is the messenger, she has some level of obligation
to tune in. Hours after Williams contested her dementia diagnosis in a
February interview, Morrissey requested a new medical evaluation.
Morrissey sought to block the release of the 2024 Lifetime documentary Where Is Wendy Williams?,
and she and the network are currently suing each other. Morrissey
claims that the four-part series exploited its subject’s erratic
behavior and drinking. The network accuses her of trying to “silence
criticism of her controversial and failed administration.” Each party
denies the other’s allegations, and Morrissey has said she has “no
interest” in pursuing her suit “in the extremely unlikely event” that
the new examination finds that Williams has the mental capacity to
oversee it. (The judge has granted a three-month stay pending the
medical evaluation.)
The judge in Williams’s conservatorship case,
Morrissey said, recently granted her a limited exemption to a broad
sealing order for the purpose of clarifying the record following
Williams’s claims about her and other allegations made on social media
and in the press. When we spoke, Morrissey had a crisis communications
professional and her own lawyer on the line as she tried to clear up an
emerging narrative.
“Nobody’s saying that Wendy
can’t leave a building,” Morrissey said, citing Williams’s two recent
trips to Florida for her son’s college graduation and her father’s 94th
birthday. “But that has become a thread that people pick up on.”
According
to Morrissey, Williams’s cats were a bonded pair of siblings who were
rehomed amid Williams’s moves between medical facilities. Williams’s
current building only allows one cat per resident. Morrissey said that
Williams didn’t want to split the pair, and that, when presented with an
option to get a new single cat, she declined.
Williams
was diagnosed by doctors at Weill Cornell Medical Center, according to
one of Morrissey’s court filings, and ruled incapacitated by a judge. In
general, Morrissey described her work in terms of its adherence to
court orders, explaining that Williams’s living arrangements and level
of care have flowed from medical recommendations. “It’s not something
that I decided,” she said.
Despite the press
appearances, Morrissey said Williams hasn’t seemed angry with her when
they talk. They had spoken the night before our interview, and Morrissey
said that they typically see each other a few times a month. She was
even but firm about how she had been conducting her job and, under the
circumstances, only intermittently defensive. She said that, in addition
to showing that Williams hasn’t been emotionally abused, she felt
compelled to address a more sweeping disparagement of the system in
which she works—one that revolves, she noted, around difficult
circumstances and decisions.
On
the whole, Morrissey said, guardianships are often misunderstood. In
her view, the aim is to maximize a person’s ability to make choices, at
least within the boundaries of safety and bureaucratic constraint. “I
had one woman who all she wanted to do is listen to Frank Sinatra,” she
remembered. “If she said to me, I’m going to stand here and jump out the
window, we wouldn’t let her do that.”
As the push
to support Spears escalated, culminating in the end of her
conservatorship in late 2021, advocates saw an opportunity for a broader
reevaluation of guardianship practices. The director of the American
Civil Liberties Union’s Disability Rights Program, Zoe Brennan-Krohn,
believes the mechanism should only be used as an absolute last resort,
and wondered if any less restrictive options had been tried in
Williams’s case.
Even if a guardian “started with
the best of intentions,” Brennan-Krohn said, “it is very hard to come
back from the real harm to your personhood that people feel when they
are told it doesn't matter what you want.”
Healthcare attorney Harry Nelson
has worked with several prescribing doctors whose celebrity patients
died of opioid overdoses, including Michael Jackson and Prince. He said
that observers of Williams’s case would be right to be troubled by what
they’re seeing and hearing, and he identified what he sees as
fundamental issues with the care relationships formed out of
conservatorships.
“There’s an aspect of
self-preservation and guardians inherently become conservators of their
own.” Nelson said. “Obviously you don’t accept the responsibility
without believing that you’re in an essential role.”
The
most restrictive forms of guardianship, he added, tend to be the most
straightforward for the conservator. “The safest way to prevent Wendy
Williams from self-harm or from financial abuse is just to cut her off
and effectively restrain her from doing anything.”
Like Spears’s and Bynes’s fans, Williams’s most devout acolytes have been studying the conversation around guardianships. Jarrius Adams,
a 27-year-old Washington, DC–based attorney focused on voting rights,
runs a small account on X, @FreeWendy2025, aimed at raising awareness
about what he described to me as Morrissey’s failings.
Adams grew up watching The Wendy Williams Show,
and in recent years, he said, “I realized that we’re seeing the exact
same thing that happened to people who a lot of supporters got behind,”
including Spears. He believes that Morrissey is retaliating against
Williams for her outspokenness. While he and like-minded observers have
not yet organized protests, he thought a tipping point could arrive with
the recent uptick of attention.
Morrissey is
white, and online backlash has sometimes emphasized the racial dynamic
between her and a highly visible Black woman in her care. Adams
specified that Morrissey’s behavior was not in keeping with the tenets
that he learned at Howard University.
“I went to
law school to help people and not take advantage of them,” Adams said.
“When I think of Sabrina Morrissey, I think of people who are the
opposite of me.”
“Can she speak?” Morrissey said,
responding to some of the social media and tabloid chatter that
highlighted Williams’s interview performances. “Yes, she’s a
professional speaker.”
“But when I speak to her,
and it’s not scripted and it’s not repetitive, do I see issues with her
speech? Yes, I do, but the public isn’t having conversations with her
the way I do.”
When she was assigned the case,
Morrissey didn’t know much about Williams or the news surrounding her
health decline. She said she wasn’t very familiar with Spears’s case
either, and that her day-to-day work hadn’t changed in its aftermath.
While she could imagine general instances of exploitation within the
conservatorship structure, she said she’d have nothing to gain from
restricting Williams’s movements, and that, given the level of judicial
oversight, “If you wanted to take money or do something that wasn’t
legal or proper, a guardianship would be the absolute wrong place to do
it.”
Morrissey enjoys
the practical and interpersonal challenges that accompany cases such as
Williams’s. “As a guardian, you are a fiduciary,” she said. “I can’t let
whatever happens in the public affect how I respond to her and how I
continue to help her.”
Richard Seeger
is a thrift store cashier in a suburb of Detroit. He has a degree in
criminal justice, he told me, and alongside “#FreeWendy,” his bio on X
includes American, pride, Israeli, and Ukrainian flags. He has designs
on becoming a streamer and asked if I could include his handle,
@Lion2Ya, in this story.
Seeger wasn’t sure that
there was a villain in Williams’s case, apart from perhaps the law
itself. “I understand that [Morrissey] is the lady who was court
appointed and my notion is that maybe it’s kind of a hands-off
approach,” he said, but he was also “getting the sense that maybe she
isn’t fully within Wendy’s best interest.”
Another onlooker I spoke to struck a similarly ambivalent note. Valerie Connolly,
a 43-year-old stay-at-home mother, grew up in Yonkers and, while not a
hardcore fan, became familiar with Williams in her pre-television days
as a New York City shock jock. She closely followed A$AP Rocky’s and Young Thug’s recent trials and views Williams’s case in the same vein of celebrity-justice matters.
Above
all, Connolly found the situation sad. She also wanted to know more,
and started poking around after Williams spoke out about her distress,
even if the answers have been somewhat lacking. “There’s bits and pieces
of it that I don’t understand completely,” Connolly said. “Maybe you’re
never really going to know the why for certain things.”
Full Article & Source:
Wendy Williams, Her Guardian, and the Age of the Celebrity Conservatorship
See Also:
Wendy Williams
