Daily SumUp

Wendy Williams has spoken out about her court-mandated guardianship in a rare interview on Thursday morning, saying that it makes her “feel like I’m in prison”.

The longtime TV host and personality called into the popular Breakfast Club radio show for an interview, in which she discussed her current situation living in a care facility. Williams has largely been out of the public eye since 2021.

Williams criticized the guardianship system on the show and said that she waas experiencing “emotional abuse”.

“This system is broken, this system that I’m in,” Williams said. “This system has falsified a lot.”

Williams’s niece Alex Finnie also spoke on air and said that while Williams was able to call her family, they could not call her directly and she had no access to personal devices with access to the internet.

“My aunt sounds great,” Finnie said. “I’ve seen her in a very limited capacity, but I’ve seen her and we’re talking to her. This does not match an incapacitated person.”

Her TV show, the Wendy Williams Show, went off-air in 2022, the same year that a New York judge placed Williams, 60, under a guardianship. Wells Fargo, her bank, told the court that she was an “incapacitate person” and had been subject to “undue influence and financial exploitation”.

Last February, Williams’s team shared an update with the public that she had been diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia, which affects her ability to communicate, and frontotemporal dementia, which affects the brain’s frontal and temporal lobes. In a statement, her team said the diagnosis affected Williams’s ability to process information, occasionally losing words and having difficulty understanding financial transactions.