Wendy Williams has spoken out about her court-mandated guardianship in a rare interview on Thursday morning, saying that it makes her “feel like I’m in prison”.
The longtime TV host and personality called into the popular Breakfast Club radio show for an interview, in which she discussed her current situation living in a care facility. Williams has largely been out of the public eye since 2021.
Williams criticized the guardianship system on the show and said that she waas experiencing “emotional abuse”.
“This system is broken, this system that I’m in,” Williams said. “This system has falsified a lot.”
Williams’s niece Alex Finnie also spoke on air and said that while Williams was able to call her family, they could not call her directly and she had no access to personal devices with access to the internet.
“My aunt sounds great,” Finnie said. “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.”
Her TV show, the Wendy Williams Show, went off-air in 2022, the same year that a New York judge placed Williams, 60, under a guardianship. Wells Fargo, her bank, told the court that she was an “incapacitate person” and had been subject to “undue influence and financial exploitation”.
Last February, Williams’s team shared an update with the public that she had been diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia, which affects her ability to communicate, and frontotemporal dementia, which affects the brain’s frontal and temporal lobes. In a statement, her team said the diagnosis affected Williams’s ability to process information, occasionally losing words and having difficulty understanding financial transactions.
The announcement immediately preceded the release of a four-part Lifetime docuseries that focused on Williams’s life under her guardianship. Attorneys for her guardian filed a lawsuit against Lifetime and other producers of the docuseries, saying that it was exploitive of Williams, who had become “cognitively impaired and impermanently incapacitated”.
But Williams on Thursday pushed back on those claims, saying that she waas not cognitively impaired and was instead “definitely isolated”.
“Do I seem that way, goddammit?” she asked. “I am not cognitively impaired. But I feel like I’m in prison.”
At the end of the show, the hosts of the Breakfast Club expressed their hopes that the interview would lead to greater freedom for Williams.
“Y’all cannot hide Wendy,” the host Charlamagne tha God said. “Do not hear this phone call and see this all in the news and think you’re going to take away her phone and isolate her.”
