Wendy Williams Says Her Guardianship Is Like A “Prison”. Is A #FreeWendy Movement Next?

Wendy Williams, the former broadcasting powerhouse once dubbed ‘the queen of all media’, has spoken out for the first time about her controversial guardianship. During a bombshell interview with The Breakfast Club radio show on 15 January, Williams gave listeners never-before-heard insight into her tumultuous personal life.

Speaking live from the New York care facility where she lives full-time, she described being totally stripped of her autonomy. “Where I am, you have to get keys to unlock the door to press the elevator to go downstairs,” she said. “I have breakfast, lunch and dinner right here on the bed. I watch TV, I listen to radio, I look at the window, I talk on the phone.” According to Williams, the cell phone she uses is limited to outgoing calls only, meaning she’s able to make calls but nobody can contact her.

She says that her actual phone, the one she used before her life was overtaken by a conservatorship, is with her guardian, New York lawyer Sabrina Morrisey. With full responsibility over Williams’ finances, Morrisey was Court-appointed as Williams’ conservator in 2022 following Wells Fargo’s claim that she was ‘incapacitated’. It’s an accusation that the former talk show host vehemently denies. “I’m not cognitively impaired,” she asserted on The Breakfast Club, “but I feel like I am in prison.” 

Williams went on to share shocking details about her isolating guardianship, describing it as “emotional abuse.” Guardianships exist to protect the financial and personal affairs of those that the courts deem unfit to manage themselves (conservatorships focus on financial matters). Though they’re designed to support the most vulnerable, conservatees can easily be exploited depending on the extent of their legal agreement. Allegations of guardian abuse are far from uncommon and it’s been argued that guardianships can infringe on a person’s human rights.

Williams’ case, along with many others, lends credence to calls from New York lawmakers to overhaul the state’s ‘troubled guardianship system’. “This system is broken. This system has falsified a lot,” Williams told The Breakfast Club, also sharing that for the last three years she has spent her birthdays alone.

Charlamagne Tha God, one of the show’s hosts and Williams’ former protégé, said yesterday: “This is a fuse that I wanted to light that I know will explode, and then we’ll know what to do next.” They were hoping for a media storm and they most definitely succeeded. Now that Williams has pointed the finger at Morrissey, social media has been galvanised and the #FreeWendy campaign has been ignited. 

‘THE SAME WAY PEOPLE WAS SAYING FREE BRITNEY, WE NEED TO HAVE THE SAME ENERGY FOR WENDY’ one user commented on YouTube. 

‘#freewendy free Wendy Williams from this evil woman keeping Wendy locked away,’ somebody posted on X.

‘I just feel like if it was able to be done for Britney, why can’t it be done for Wendy???’ asked somebody on Instagram. 

Created in the same vein as the #FreeBritney movement which culminated in the termination of Britney Spears’ 13-year conservatorship — it seems that Williams’ supporters are hoping for the same result. 

In 2023 Williams was diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia — a condition that gradually debilitates speech — and frontotemporal dementia, which according to Williams’ son Kevin Hunter Jr, doctors claim was caused by excessive alcohol consumption. Concerns over her cognitive faculties first surfaced in October 2017 when she fainted during a live taping of The Wendy Williams Show. It was a month after her then-husband’s decade-long affair had become public, and marked the beginning of the media titan’s unravelling. 

In December 2018 Williams released a statement after slurring her words in the middle of her ‘Hot Topics’ segment, which she blamed on pain medication due to an arm fracture. Things got worse in the court of public opinion when in March 2019 she announced that she’d been living in a sober house. “You know I’ve struggled with cocaine in my past, and I never went to a place to get the treatment,” she said tearfully on air, though it was unclear what, if any, substances she was struggling with at the time. 

The following month, after 21 years of marriage, Williams filed for divorce from Kevin Hunter which she announced a few days before moving out of her sober living facility. Her final appearance on The Wendy Williams Show was in July 2021. Those anticipating the season 13 premiere, which was due to air that September, had to wait until October when the show returned without Williams at the helm. 

Fans remained hopeful that she would reclaim her spot on her beloved purple chair, even after it was confirmed that she would be absent for the remainder of the season. By the time Morrisey was appointed as Williams’ financial guardian in May 2022, the once larger-than-life personality who’d dominated radio and television for two decades was no more. Occasionally she’d be spotted shuffling around New York, often looking frail, vacant and vulnerable.

It was a couple of years before Williams would go viral again, but this time it was by design. The Where is Wendy Williams? documentary aired in February 2024, giving viewers an unfiltered glimpse into the struggles she’d been battling throughout the preceding few years. But rather than placate her fans, the documentary raised questions about the quality of care Williams was receiving from her conservator, leaving many concerned for her wellbeing. Speaking to The Breakfast Club yesterday, Wendy revealed that the documentary was Morrisey’s idea, stating, “She [Morrisey] was the one who wanted to do that.” 

Despite this, Morrisey filed a suit against A&E Networks days before the four-and-a-half-hour special was scheduled to air in hopes that she could block its release. According to A&E’s countersuit, “It was only when Morrissey realized that the documentary would question the quality of her own guardianship of [Williams] that Morrissey suddenly decided to try to ensure the documentary would never be released.”

It’s still too soon to predict whether or not the #FreeWendy campaign can gain the momentum needed to influence the terms of Williams’ guardianship. Now that the seeds have been planted, only time will tell if, and how, they’ll grow. In the meantime, many see her interview as a win for the seismic talent who grabbed the world’s attention with her eccentric brand of celebrity gossip. Fans are mourning Wendy Williams the onscreen personality and now, in real life, the fight for Williams the person seems to have just begun.