Wendy Williams’s Guardian Says She Couldn’t Consent to Lifetime Doc

November 27, 2024
4:52 pm

Wendy Williams’s life is still playing out in public, even as Williams herself remains out of the public eye. Her guardian, Sabrina Morrissey, filed a complaint in New York this September alleging that Williams did not have the capacity to consent to a Lifetime documentary series about her current life, per the Los Angeles Times. Williams was diagnosed with early-onset dementia and aphasia in 2023, and she shared the information publicly in February 2024. She has been in a guardianship since 2022. The Lifetime series Where Is Wendy Williams? listed Williams as an executive producer. The complaint says that Williams “was highly vulnerable and clearly incapable of consenting to being filmed, much less humiliated and exploited.” The complaint asks for money from the defendants — including Lifetime’s parent company, A&E Networks — and for the documentary series to stop being broadcast.

In the complaint, Morrissey says that the contracts Williams may have signed, including an “on-camera talent agreement,” are invalid because they were not shared with her guardian. The filming for the documentary began in August 2022 and ended in April 2023 — one month before Williams’s initial diagnosis. When the trailer for the documentary dropped, on February 2, Morrissey attempted to block the series’ release, but an appellate judge denied her request, according to the Times. The documentarians have not spoken positively about Williams’s guardianship. “There’s a bill in the New York Legislature right now that’s designed to curb guardian abuse and prevent guardians from restricting access to family members,” executive producer Mark Ford told Vulture on February 27, 2024. “I’m not sure where that bill stands, but this is a perfect illustration of a family that wants to be in touch, wants to be involved, but for whatever reason can’t.”