Wendy Williams has been taken to hospital after dropping a note from the window of her assisted living facility which read: “Help! Wendy!!”
The former The Wendy Williams Show host, 60, has been under a financial guardianship since 2022. Last year, her care team announced she had been diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia and frontotemporal dementia.
PageSix reports that New York police were called to the facility shortly after 11:15 a.m. on Monday to do a wellness check.
She then walked to a waiting ambulance while being escorted by officers.
According to TMZ, Williams was then taken to Lenox Hill Hospital where she is undergoing an independent examination to attempt to determine whether her cognitive functions are sufficiently intact for her to end her guardianship.
In January, Williams called into a popular New York radio show to say: “I feel like I’m in prison.”
Pushing back against her dementia diagnosis, Williams asked The Breakfast Club hosts DJ Envy, Charlamagne Tha God and Jess Hilarious: “Do I seem that way, god damn it?”
“I am not cognitively impaired, you know what I’m saying? But I feel like I’m in prison,” she said of the care facility.
“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.”
“I keep the door closed,” Williams added of her daily life at the facility. “I watch TV. I listen to the radio. I watch the window. I sit here, and my life goes by.”
Williams was the subject of a Lifetime docuseries that aired last year, which featured numerous scenes of the ex-host unsteady, belligerent, confused, and also drunk.
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“She was the one who wanted to do that, you understand what I’m saying?” Williams said of her guardian, Sabrina E. Morrissey, adding: “What do I think about being abused? Look, this system is broken, this system that I’m in. This system has falsified a lot.”
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 cancelled in 2022.
In a press release last year, Williams’s care team wrote: “Over the past few years, questions have been raised at times about Wendy’s ability to process information and many have speculated about Wendy’s condition, particularly when she began to lose words, act erratically at times, and have difficulty understanding financial transactions.
“The decision to share this news was difficult and made after careful consideration, not only to advocate for understanding and compassion for Wendy, but to raise awareness about aphasia and frontotemporal dementia and support the thousands of others facing similar circumstances,” the release added.
“Unfortunately, many individuals diagnosed with aphasia and frontotemporal dementia face stigma and misunderstanding, particularly when they begin to exhibit behavioral changes but have not yet received a diagnosis.”
