HOW IS WENDY?
DISTURBING NEW DOCUMENTARY REVEALS UNSETTLING DETAILS ABOUT FORMER DAYTIME TALK-SHOW HOST
From her signature pink armchair, Wendy Williams helmed one of the top-rated daytime talk shows for more than a decade, attracting a loyal following who came to expect her bold takes on celebrity gossip.
In Where is Wendy Williams?, a four-part special that recently aired on Lifetime, a documentary crew set out to chronicle Williams’s journey to revive her career amid growing concerns about health issues that forced her to abruptly leave her talk show in 2022. But the series centred largely on personal and unsettling scenes of Williams’s declining health and her addiction issues, which later derailed filming after she was admitted to a medical facility for treatment.
In the days leading up to the première, Williams’s care team gave a startling update on those health challenges, announcing that she was diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) last year.
She underwent tests amid widespread speculation about her condition, “particularly when she began to lose words, act erratically at times and have difficulty understanding financial transactions,” a press release stated.
Primary progressive aphasia is a neurological syndrome that gradually impairs communication skills.
FTD refers to rare types of dementia that affect the frontal and temporal lobes in the brain. Bruce Willis was also diagnosed with FTD last year.
“My mom has done a good job of making it seem like everything is OK, always,” Williams’s son Kevin Hunter Jr. says during the docuseries.
“But in reality, there’s something wrong going on.”
Several scenes in the documentary show Williams appearing to struggle with her memory and following conversations.
A trip Williams took to get vape pens from her usual smoke shop turned sour as she lashed out at her publicist Shawn Zanotti and her driver.
She didn’t recognize the store, and demanded the specific vapes she wanted despite Zanotti telling her they weren’t in stock.
Later, in an emotional sitdown from her New York City apartment with reality star Angela White (also known as Blac Chyna), Williams removes her wig and shows White her bare feet, misshapen and swollen as a result of lymphedema. During their conversation, Williams appears confused and abruptly tells White that her real name is “Wendy Hunter. Yup. And I’m divorced. He’s got no money.” (Williams filed for divorce from Kevin Hunter, her husband of more than 20 years, in 2019 after he fathered a child with another woman.)
“When it comes to my aunt’s dementia, there are three things that didn’t help,” Williams’s niece Alex Finnie says in the docuseries. “Her divorce, the pandemic and then losing (her mom),” who died in December 2020.
Williams’s fractured relationships come to surface throughout the series. Cameras followed along as she reunited with her family in Miami last year for the first time in eight months. Relatives interviewed in the documentary revealed she had previously stayed with them when The Wendy Williams Show was still in production and concerns for her health and well-being were growing.
Williams was doing better when she was with her family in Florida, Hunter Jr. said, adding that he kept her away from alcohol and helped her gain 20 to 30 pounds. But he and other family members claim that her talk show producers began pressuring Williams to return to New York City and resume filming. “They saw that she was down here for too long and (that) our priority wasn’t just to dust her up and put her back onstage,” said Williams’s nephew Travis Finnie. “It was to actually focus on long-term recovery.” She only went back to New York City after the court intervened, Alex Finnie added.
The family pushed back on accusations against them that contributed to the court-ordered financial guardianship Williams was placed under in June 2022, after Wells Fargo argued in a petition that she was a victim of “undue influence and financial exploitation.”
The bank questioned Williams’s son about spending $100,000 from his mother’s account, said Travis Finnie, even though Williams had previously approved spending similar amounts on her son’s birthday party, Uber Eats orders and rent. Hunter Jr. said he’s only spent his mother’s money with her consent.
Sabrina Morrissey, who says she’s the temporary guardian of “W.W.H.,” likely Williams, filed a sealed lawsuit in New York Supreme Court last Thursday against Lifetime parent company A&E Television Networks and Entertainment One Reality Productions to temporarily stop the documentary’s release. However, a judge decided a day later that the special couldn’t be barred from airing, as it would violate the companies’ freedom of speech.
“We are grateful the court acted quickly,” Rachel Strom, an attorney for the entertainment companies, said in a statement. “Viewers can watch the documentary for themselves and form their own opinions about the show and hear about Wendy Williams’s recent struggles in her own words.”