Wendy Williams will speak on “The View” Friday in a highly anticipated interview after the former talk show host was spotted begging for help from her room at an assisted-living facility.
The incident sparked new scrutiny of the guardianship that Williams was put under by a judge. Guardianships, also called conservatorships in some states, grant control of a person’s financial affairs or healthcare to a third-party if a court finds they cannot care for themselves. In 2022, Williams was diagnosed with dementia and aphasia — but she’s disputed that she’s cognitively impaired.
Williams’ new interview with “The View” taped on Thursday, and drag entertainer Kiki Ball-Change attended with a friend,telling Entertainment Weekly that the show’s hosts spoke by phone with Williams for about 15-20 minutes over two segments.
Ball-Change said that Williams seemed relatively lucid during “The View” interview.
“I’d say, for the most part, she sounded pretty normal. She doesn’t sound anywhere near needing any sort of guardianship,” Ball-Change told EW, before noting that “View” panelist Sunny Hostin — a longtime friend of Williams — also said during the segments that the former talk show host sounded “normal.”
The interview came just days after Williams dropped a note from her room at a New York assisted-living facility that read “Help! Wendy!” and was later taken to a local hospital for an independent cognitive examination.
During the interview, Ball-Change said Williams griped about trying to leave the facility to have lunch with her niece, only to be told she wasn’t allowed out and that her niece could be arrested.
Sources told TMZ on Wednesday that the Coterie, the facility where Williams is living, filed a police report with the NYPD claiming Williams’ niece, Alex, snuck her aunt out of the building by evading staff.
Williams also reportedly said on “The View” that she wished the people behind her guardianship would “get off my neck” and vowed never to work with the judge or the guardian again because “she wants to be free.”
“It was really heartbreaking, which was something I wasn’t expecting,” Ball-Change told EW.
A lawyer for Sabrina Morrissey, Williams’ guardian, told TMZ that some of the media coverage of the guardianship and Morrissey is “untrue, inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading.”
In addition, the lawyer claimed that Williams is allowed to call or see her family whenever she wants.