There has been more movement in Wendy Williams’s fight to free herself from a court-appointed guardianship. ABC News reported that NYPD officers arrived at Williams’s assisted-living facility on Monday after receiving a call for a wellness check. Prior to their arrival, according to the New York Post, Williams dropped a note from her window that read, “Help! Wendy!!” She was taken to Lenox Hill Hospital in an ambulance but was able to get into the vehicle on her own. According to TMZ, Williams was given a psychological evaluation called a “capacity test” and answered ten out of ten questions correctly.
Williams has been living under a guardianship since 2022, when her bank declared that she was a victim of financial exploitation and a court appointed a guardian named Sabrina Morrissey. In 2024, Williams’s family announced that the former talk-show host had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia and aphasia, diagnoses that she now claims are not accurate.
In February, Williams participated in a TMZ documentary about her guardianship. She explained that she’s currently living on the memory-care floor of an assisted-living facility and compared her living situation to being in prison. She told TMZ founder Harvey Levin that she had been able to leave the facility only twice in the 30 days prior to their conversation.
On Tuesday, Williams called in to “The Breakfast Club” along with a caretaker unaffiliated with the guardianship, Ginalisa Monterroso, to explain what happened during her visit to the hospital, which she said was prompted not by the note she wrote but by a call Monterroso made to the police on her behalf. Monterroso confirmed to host Charlamagne tha God that she called the police, at which point they went to Williams’s room to perform a wellness check.
Once at the hospital — Williams and Monterroso claim that employees at the assisted-living facility attempted to stop Williams from leaving — Monterroso claims Williams was given two psychological evaluations and passed both. According to Monterroso and Williams, Morrissey (the guardian) was also at the hospital and did not speak to Williams but did attempt to stop the evaluations from happening. Williams’s lawyer was apparently also present and advocated for the tests.
All of this new information comes on the heels of an interview Morrissey did last week with Vanity Fair, in which she sought to set the record straight about her role in Williams’s life and about the former daytime-TV star’s current mental state. She told the magazine that she takes her cues for Williams’s housing and level of care from medical recommendations, saying, “It’s not something that I decided.”
With regard to recent interviews in which Williams seems much more cogent than what Morrissey described in court documents, Morrissey told Vanity Fair that she didn’t totally believe it. “Can she speak? Yes, she’s a professional speaker,” Morrissey said. “But when I speak to her, and it’s not scripted and it’s not repetitive, do I see issues with her speech? Yes, I do, but the public isn’t having conversations with her the way I do.”
So what now? Well, it seems that Williams and Monterroso are going to keep pushing for a judge to repeal the guardianship. On “The Breakfast Club,” Monterroso seemed convinced that the competency tests Williams took at the hospital will be valuable evidence in her case moving forward. Morrissey, meanwhile, is committed to doing the job she’s been assigned to do. “I can’t let whatever happens in the public affect how I respond to her and how I continue to help her,” she told Vanity Fair. For those really wanting to stay on top of this story, Williams will be calling in to The View on Friday.