Wendy Williams’ family starts GoFundMe to free her from guardianship after star says she only has $15
Wendy Williams’ family has started a GoFundMe Page to bring her back to her family, as she’s been living in a treatment facility in New York under a guardianship.
The fundraiser is being organized to urgently help Williams’ “family in expediting her return to her rightful home in Florida,” according to the description of the GoFundMe. As of January 17, the fundraiser — which aims to “Support Wendy Williams’ Fight for Independence” — has raised more than $15,000, out of its $15,000 goal.
“For far too long, Wendy has faced the challenges of being unjustly placed under guardianship and labeled as incapacitated, despite her strong will and determination to live her life independently,” the description of the page reads. “Her current situation is not only unfair but also deeply isolating.”
The former daytime TV host, 60, has been under guardianship since 2022. Last year, her care team announced she had been diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia and frontotemporal dementia.
The GoFundMe page also claimed that Williams’ guardian has “severed her connections with friends and family, leaving her without the support network she so desperately needs.” Williams’ isolation in New York has also made it more difficult to “maintain her strength and resilience.”
While Williams’ family is “advocating for her return,” they are also emotionally and financially struggling, as they witness how the isolation is impacting her well-being.
“Unfortunately, they have exhausted their financial resources in their fight against this unjust guardianship and are in dire need of assistance to secure legal representation,” Williams’ family wrote. “Legal services can be prohibitively expensive, and without our support, they may struggle to navigate the complexities of the situation.”
The GoFundMe page came after Williams said that she doesn’t have a lot of money in the treatment facility that her guardian has placed her in.
“I have $15,” she claimed during a rare appearance on The Breakfast Club radio show on Thursday (January 16). “I have $15, what does that do? My money is in prison.”
“The guardian has somebody get me nail polish, like the normal things that I like,” she added. “‘I need a new hairbrush; well this is not the one I want but I guess this is the one I’m forced to use.”
Also in an episode, she hit back at how her guardian, Sabrina Morrissey, claimed in November that Williams was “permanently incapacitated.”
“I am not cognitively impaired, you know what I’m saying? But I feel like I’m in prison,” she said. “I am definitely isolated. To talk to these people who live here, that is not my cup of tea... I’m in this place where the people are in their nineties and their eighties and their seventies… There’s something wrong with these people here on this floor.”
Williams’ niece Alex also called on to The Breakfast Club to defend her. “My aunt sounds great,” she 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.”
Williams is best known for her eponymously titled chat show, The Wendy Williams Show, which she hosted from 2008 to 2021. She stepped away as host due to medical issues, with numerous guest hosts filling in. It was later canceled in 2022.
In May 2022, she entered court-ordered guardianship, following a pattern of concerns about her welfare and finances. This also came after Wells Fargo froze her bank accounts and filed a petition to obtain temporary financial guardianship over her, arguing she was of “unsound mind.”
In a court filing obtained by The Independent in November 2024, Morrissey said that Williams was “permanently incapacitated.”
In February 2024, Morrissey unsuccessfully attempted to prevent Lifetime from releasing the documentary Where is Wendy Williams? The appellate judge ruled that preventing the documentary release would be an “impermissible prior restraint on speech that violates the First Amendment of the institution.”
Williams’s guardian went on to file a lawsuit against Lifetime and the production companies — Entertainment One Reality Productions, Lifetime Entertainment Services, A&E Television Networks, Creature Films, and Mark Ford — days later before amending her complaint in September.
Where is Wendy Williams? featured numerous scenes of the former talk show host unsteady, belligerent, confused, and also drunk. Her manager would regularly find liquor bottles hidden throughout her apartment, behavior that producers say unnerved them while filming.
