Court filings say Wendy Williams now "cognitively impaired" and "permanently disabled"
The ugly lawsuit currently raging between Wendy Williams' legal guardian and the producers of Lifetime's Where Is Wendy Williams? docuseries continues to kick up sad little chunks of debris—including reports today, taken from a memo filed with the courts earlier this month, that the 60-year-old former talk show host is now "cognitively impaired, permanently disabled, and legally incapacitated."
If you haven't been following this suit, be warned: It's all bummers from here on in. Basically, Williams had her bank accounts frozen by Wells Fargo back in 2022 (not long after The Wendy Williams Show went off the air), with the bank requesting that a guardian be put in place to manage her affairs. The courts agreed, putting a woman named Sabrina Morrissey into the position. Morrissey, in turn, wasn't happy about filmmakers wanting to make a docuseries about Williams' current life, unsuccessfully petitioning to have the release of the series blocked back in February of this year, shortly before it ended up coming out. (Morrissey claims that Williams wasn't competent to consent to being filmed.) At the same time, Williams' care team released a statement (apparently co-signed by Williams) that she was suffering from aphasia and frontotemporal dementia, diagnosed in 2023. Then, earlier this month, as part of ongoing legal action, Morrissey filed a legal memo asking for the redaction of certain details from court filings in the interest of maintaining Williams' "privacy and dignity," and that's where the "permanently disabled" statement came out.
The memo also took the opportunity to toss a few more punches at A&E, including the assertion that "This case arises from the brutally calculated, deliberate actions of powerful and cravenly opportunistic media companies working together with a producer to knowingly exploit [Williams]." (A&E has its own counterclaim running against Morrissey, along with claims that both Williams' manager, and her family, were in support of the series coming out. As is often the case where people are no longer apparently in control of their own imaging or messaging, the battleground surrounding Williams' welfare has gotten disturbing and complex in recent years.)
For what it's worth, critics weren't especially kind to Where Is Wendy Williams?, which included interviews with Williams herself, who was credited as an executive producer, and who appears erratic and confused in the ensuing footage; Variety referred to the series as "exploitative" and went so far as to suggest that it never should have been filmed. So, yeah: Bummers all around.