Former talk show queen Wendy Williams has had an incredibly rough run over the past several years. In addition to numerous health problems and personal issues, she was placed under a conservatorship in spring 2022 and has since been deemed “legally incapacitated by her court appointed conservator, Sabrina E. Morrissey. However, Williams and a family member recently spoke out about the conservatorship and the woman who runs it, saying it’s left the public figure in a “luxury prison.”
What Did Wendy Williams And Her Family Say About The Conservatorship Leaving Her In A “Luxury Prison”?
While some of Wendy Williams' health struggles have been confirmed by the star herself, like her Graves’ disease and lymphedema diagnosis, the big question for a lot of fans has been whether or not her mental state actually requires her to have a conservatorship. The early 2024 Lifetime documentary, Where Is Wendy Williams?, explored many issues facing the star in the wake of her daytime talk show ending without her, to the point that many fans saw it as exploitative.
Now, Williams and her niece, Alex, have spoken out about how she’s been treated under the conservatorship, during an interview on The Breakfast Club. As the star explained:
I am not cognitively impaired, but I feel like I am in prison. I’m in New York City, but I’m in this place where people are in their nineties and their eighties, and even when people are in their sixties, like me, there’s something wrong with these people. And I’m not saying something bad [about them], but I’m with these people and I’m clearly not [incapacitated]... For the last three years I’ve been caught up in the system… The system that I’m in is broken.
She then went on to say that she basically does everything from her room (which she says only has one window), and noted that she can’t even leave that space without someone unlocking the door for her. In addition, she’s not allowed to have her cell phone, or any computers, tablets, etc, and is only able to watch TV or listen to the radio.
Williams called in for the interview, so there is a phone in her room, but both she and Alex describe the difficulty of getting and staying in touch with her. Additionally, family and friends have not been allowed to see her. Alex added that her aunt has been in a “luxury prison” and said:
She can call us, but we can’t call her. That’s been the reality since 2023. That room that she’s sitting in? She’s there every day, all hours of the day, every week, every month. She’s not getting proper sunlight. I went to New York in October to visit her and the level of questions and security in terms of who am I, why am I here, what’s the purpose [of the visit], it was absolutely just horrible.
The show’s host then had an associate, Loren Lorosa, describe the difficulty she had when trying to visit Williams just a few days before the interview. Apparently, she was on the phone with Williams when she arrived and was allowed to sign in with everyone at the front desk being aware of who Williams was. They called her conservator, Morrissey, who didn’t answer, but Lorosa says that’s when the atmosphere changed:
Everything was fine, and then all of a sudden it flipped. These men came out and they were like, ‘Who are you? What are you here for?’ I told them who I was and that I was there to see Wendy and they said, ‘We don’t have anyone here by that name.’ I didn’t even feel comfortable still being in the lobby the way I was treated. It was insane. Wendy [had spoken] to the concierge herself and said, ‘I want to see this person’... They said to me, ‘We don’t know Sabrina [Morrissey] and we don’t know Wendy,’ multiple times.
There is a lot more that was revealed by the nearly 40 minute interview, including the fact that her family has set up a Go Fund Me to support Wendy Williams’ fight for independence. Hopefully, the many issues that appear to have come out of this conservatorship can be resolved sooner rather than later.
