Wendy Williams’ guardianship was launched into the spotlight this week after she was photographed staging a dramatic cry for help from the window of her New York City assisted living facility. The former talkshow host’s quest to secure her freedom is igniting fresh debate over the highly contested legal arrangement. 

New York Police paid Ms. Williams a visit on Monday after she dropped a note from her fifth-floor window to a group of paparazzi begging for help. The handwritten scribble contained the alarming message: “Help! Wendy!!” 

Ms. Williams was escorted out of the facility by the police and ushered into an ambulance that brought her to Lenox Hill hospital for a cognitive assessment. According to TMZ, Ms. Williams “scored 10 out of 10” on the psychological exam and the medical examiner declared that her “mental capacity is fully intact.” New York officials, TMZ reports, have since launched two probes into Ms. Williams’ guardianship, one of which will investigate whether she is being subject to “elder abuse.” 

The dramatic incident comes as Ms. Williams has launched a legal battle to end the conservatorship of her court-appointed guardian, Sabrina Morrissey, who has controlled Ms. Williams’ finances and healthcare since May 2022. The guardianship was ordered after Ms. Williams’s bank claimed that she was incapacitated and a “victim of undue influence and financial exploitation.” 

In 2023, Ms. Williams was diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia — which affects the ability to speak or understand speech — and frontotemporal dementia. Ms. Morrissey claimed the following year that Ms. Williams’s dementia left her “cognitively impaired, permanently disabled, and legally incapacitated.” The TV personality, however, disputes the diagnoses. 

“I am not cognitively impaired but I feel like I am in prison,” Ms. Williams said during a tearful interview on the Breakfast Club radio show in January. “I’m in this place with people who are in their 90s and their 80s and their 70s. …. These people, there’s something wrong with these people here on this floor. I am clearly not.”

Ms. Williams, during her radio interview, lamented that the elevators in the facility are locked and that she had only been allowed to leave the building twice in the past month. She claimed she was unsure of what medications were being given to her. 

“Listen, this system is broken, this system that I am in. This system has falsified a lot,” Ms. Williams said. “For the last three years, I have been caught up in the system.” 

On Tuesday, Ms. Williams’ guardian, Ms. Morrissey, rebuffed the former talkshow host’s allegations as “untrue, inaccurate, incomplete or misleading,” she told TMZ. She further denied that Ms. Williams is barred from receiving visitors and pointed to the facility’s luxurious amenities including a “spa, a workout room, excellent food, a dining room, and outside terraces.” 

Ms. Williams’s fall from grace as the star of the 14-year-running Wendy Williams Show to being stuck in a midtown Manhattan assisted living facility has reignited conversation about court-ordered guardianships. The legal practice first gained public attention, however, through the plight of Britney Spears, whose fight to free herself from conservatorship under her father sparked a national #FreeBritney movement. 

The so-called “Princess of Pop” was first put under conservatorship in 2008 amid a public breakdown during which she shaved her head and was in and out of rehab. In 2021, Ms. Spears launched an effort to end the conservatorship, which she described as “abusive.” Among other allegations, she claimed that her father, Jamie Spears, who was her court-ordered guardian, had forced her to perform, use birth control, and take medication against her will. 

In November 2021, 13 years after Ms. Spears was placed under conservatorship, she was granted control over her finances and medical decisions. Ms. Spears’s lawyer claimed that her father and his lawyers made $36 million off of the conservatorship. 

The pop star’s legal battle inspired disability advocates to push for conservatorship reforms. Director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s disability rights program, Zoe Brennan-Krohn, told Vanity Fair that the legal practice should only be used as a last resort. 

Even for a guardianship that “started with the best of intentions,” Ms. Brennan-Krohn said, “it is very hard to come back from the real harm to your personhood that people feel when they are told it doesn’t matter what you want.” Ms. Kohn “wondered if any less restrictive options” had been tried in Ms. Williams’ case, Vanity Fair reports.  

Ms. Williams is expected to share her side of the story this coming Friday on ABC’s talkshow, the View. The former TV star will “set the record straight with something she wants to share,” the network has announced.