What We Know About Wendy Williams’s Conservatorship

As with most stories regarding celebrity conservatorships, Wendy Williams’s is long, complex, and often quite dark. From the outside, it is impossible to know the objective truth of the situation, even though much of it has played out in public.

The Wendy Williams Show first premiered in 2008, but Williams, now 60, was well-known for her famously filter-free pop culture commentary long before that. The show ran until 2022, when it was canceled amidst Williams’s physical and mental health struggles, which had become public the year before. Now Williams is under a conservatory similar to the one Britney Spears lived under, but, like Spears, she says she is being unjustly imprisoned by the legal arrangement.

To take a closer look, here is a timeline of Wendy Williams’s health struggles and conservatorship controversy, with most recent events first.

February 13, 2025: In a new interview for IMPACT x Nightline: What’s Happening with Wendy Williams? she again criticizes the care facility where she has been living.

Williams says that the floor she lives on is called the “memory unit” and adds “the people who live here don’t remember anything.”

For the second time, she denies that she has dementia. “Frontotemporal dementia? Uh, how dare you?” she tells Nightline. “No. That’s what I’ve been accused of, believe it or not. Look, I don’t belong here at all. This is ridiculous.”

January 2025: Williams appears on an episode of The Breakfast Club, where she says that she does not have dementia.

“I am not cognitively impaired,” she says, per the New York Times. “But I feel like I am in prison.” Williams also criticizes the New York-based care facility where she has been living. “Look, I have breakfast, lunch, and dinner right here on the bed,” she says. “I watch TV, I listen to radio, I look at the window, I talk on the phone.” She also complains of isolation, and says she doesn’t belong with the other people on her floor, some of whom, she adds, are in their 90s. “I would rather spend my birthday by myself than open the door and spend my birthday with these people on this floor,” she says.

Williams’s niece, Alex Finnie, also phones into the show to request better treatment for her aunt. “All I’m saying is just treat the woman with dignity and give her the freedoms that she deserves,” Finnie pleads.

November 2024: Williams’s guardian, Sabrina Morrissey, claims in court filings that Williams has been “permanently incapacitated” by early onset dementia and is cognitively impaired.

In the same filing, Morrissey and her team claim that Lifetime and Where Is Wendy Williams? executive producer Mark Ford “cruelly took advantage of Williams’s cognitive and physical decline by creating and publishing a documentary at a time when Williams was highly vulnerable and clearly incapable of consenting to be filmed.”

Morrissey’s team also claims that the docuseries creators “intentionally manipulated and goaded” Williams “to trigger strong emotional reactions and acquire embarrassing footage.”