The note dropped from the upper floor window of an assisted living facility in New York on the morning of 10 March contained a simple message: “Help! Wendy!!” it read.
For any patient inside, it would have been tragic. But, astonishingly, the writer of this note was Wendy Williams, a trailblazing television talkshow host and once one of the most recognisble daytime TV faces in America.
While half the nation pays attention to Donald Trump, the other half, it seems, is fixated on Williams, who has been under a court-ordered conservatorship since 2022 and whose clear struggles with her illness are captivating – and shocking – the US.
Williams, 60, wants to be released from her conservatorship, which she claims is similar to one that Britney Spears was place under, and has maintained in several interviews that she is “not cognitively impaired” as she was diagnosed to be two years ago.
Known as “the shock jock diva” and “the biggest mouth in New York”, Williams was taken to a hospital by police after dropping the notes, and later told the media that she passed a mental-capacity test, with questions including naming the current president, “with flying colors”.
“I am not incapacitated as I’ve been accused, and this floor that I live on is the memory unit,” Williams recalled telling officers upon their arrival. “The people who live there don’t remember anything, unlike me. Why am I here? What is going on?”
The talkshow host later “evaded staff” to get out of her facility and went to dinner with her niece at a NoHo restaurant, allegedly triggering a police report, but was spotted at her table writing in a journal and having a “super time”.
Her caretaker, Ginalisa Monterroso, now wants her to get an independent medical evaluation. But her court-ordered guardian, Sabrina Morrissey, didn’t want her to undergo a police mental-capacity test and told Vanity Fair she sees “issues” with Williams’s speech when it isn’t scripted.
Tracking Williams, and her ups and downs, is a full-time job as an army of “Wendy Watchers” will attest.
Williams was diagnosed with dementia and aphasia in 2023, one year after she exited The Wendy Williams Show. But for more than a decade Williams, who grew up in a white New Jersey suburb, delivered hot takes on pop culture-dominated daytime talk TV. Before that she’d been on Hot 97 talk radio with a format similar to Howard Stern.
She was famous for high-profile clashes with celebrities. She feuded with Beyoncé in 2012, saying she was “fortunate” that her TV in the kitchen has closed-captioning “so I’ll be able to understand what she says. You know Beyoncé can’t talk. Beyoncé sounds like she has a fifth-grade education. She can’t talk.”
She got into a beef with Whitney Houston over Houston’s lesbian relationship with her friend Robyn Crawford, and her drug use. Houston threatened to stop by William’s studio and beat her up. She called out Sean Combs, AKA Puff Daddy, long before he was charged with sex trafficking.
When Williams was eventually fired from Hot 97 in 1998, it was after she had shared a doctored image of Combs in a compromising position with another man on her website.
But Williams’s feuds came against a backdrop of personal turbulence. Six years ago, she filed for divorce from her husband and former producer Kevin Hunter. She later appeared to confirm he had fathered a child with a younger woman.
“He inconvenienced my life with his attitude, a baby and a lot of affairs,” she told USA Today about Hunter in 2021. “And now I’m going to inconvenience his by letting him know that I’ve got the best apartment, I’ve got the best view, I’ve got the best concierge, I live the best life, I eat the best food. I have the best of the best.”
In her autobiography, Wendy’s Got the Heat, she described how her dealer would bring cocaine to the studio and keep it in a green container on the kitchen counter. “I’d be on the couch at three o’clock, wide awake,” she wrote.
How far the public is willing to go in following the unfolding chapters of the Wendy Williams story is subject to the continued returns of attention capital investment.
“Even if you’ve never watched her show, she’s been around,” said the Syracuse University media professor Bob Thompson. “Eventually it might become something everybody cares about, but it’s not there yet. In the grand scheme of things – like will the constitution survive? – it’s not much, but it’s got the typical dramatic things: is it rehab, does she need rehab? Is she broke? She’s pretty much got it all.”
Never one to shy away from the limelight, on Friday, Williams kept her struggles in the public eye and phoned in to the ladies of The View television show to complain about her guardian and the judge overseeing her conservatorship.
“These two people don’t look like me, they don’t dress like me, they don’t talk like me, they don’t act like me,” Williams said. “I need them to … get off my neck.”
