‘From six years previous, all I wished was to be well-known.’
So says Wendy Williams – aka America’s most controversial speak present host – within the high-drama new trailer for a forthcoming documentary.
And by the top of it, one can’t assist however conclude that Williams paid a tragic value for that craving.
The as soon as fearless and feared radio shock-jock and warrior queen of daytime TV is variously proven drunk, bursting into tears, struggling to stroll and claiming she has no cash.
At one level, her supervisor Will Selby tries to take away a half empty liquor bottle from her bed room. ‘Hold the bottle there,’ she shouts.
It is the primary time Williams, 59, has been seen publicly in additional than a yr.
Given she was incomes $10 million a season because the host of the Wendy Williams Present, which lasted 14 collection till its abrupt cancellation in 2021, the information that she’s broke is – if true – notably stunning.
The as soon as fearless and feared radio shock-jock and warrior queen of daytime TV has been recognized with frontotemporal dementia and first progressive aphasia.
Given she was incomes $10 million a season because the host of the Wendy Williams Present, which lasted 14 collection till its abrupt cancellation in 2021, the information that she’s broke is – if true -particularly stunning.
Williams amassed a military of devoted followers for her acerbic takes on popular culture and limitless on-air skirmishes with stars – averaging greater than 1.6 million US viewers a day on the top of her fame.
Now, Williams is popping the highlight again on herself in ‘The place is Wendy Williams?’, a two-part Lifetime documentary airing later this month.
‘I’ve no cash, and I am gonna let you know one thing,’ she says, staring into the digital camera. ‘If it occurs to me, it may occur to you.’
Later, somebody out of shot enquires her if she’s seen a neurologist. ‘To seek out out if I am loopy?’ Williams asks. ‘Mmm-hmm.’
Her son Kevin Hunter Jr, 23, observes: ‘Mother has executed an amazing job making it appear to be all the pieces is OK all the time, however in actuality, there’s something incorrect happening.’
On Thursday, we discovered the unhappy reality.
Williams’s ‘care workforce’ issued a press launch stating that she was diagnosed last year with frontotemporal dementia and first progressive aphasia – notably, the identical situations that afflict Bruce Willis.
In 2022, Williams had been positioned underneath a monetary guardianship by a New York decide – after she was decided to be an ‘incapacitated particular person’ and because the end result of a life stricken by decades-long cocaine dependancy, alcoholism, and issues from Graves’ illness – an immune dysfunction.
The information of her dementia prognosis got here simply at some point after an explosive Individuals journal interview with a few of her household, by which they claimed they ‘do not know what the hell is happening [with Williams]’ and that solely her court-appointed guardian is aware of which well being facility she is at the moment staying in.
‘The individuals who love her can’t see her,’ Williams’s mom and sister informed the magazine.
Over time, Williams has fortunately shared along with her viewers a lot of her private challenges equivalent to her yo-yoing weight, cosmetic surgery obsession, a string of miscarriages and the humiliating breakdown of a wedding to her former supervisor, Kevin Hunter.
However again then, she was a multi-millionaire with a massively profitable present that even often beat Ellen DeGeneres’s viewing figures.
Clearly, issues have gotten very a lot worse since then.
As a baby she was such a loudmouth her schoolteacher dad and mom developed a code to get her to relax at social features: ‘TL’ or ‘TF’, for ‘too loud’ or ‘too quick’.
She struggled along with her weight from a younger age – a crippling insecurity that was solely fueled by stress from her dad and mom to manage her consuming – and located solace in music and movie star magazines.
Williams amassed a military of devoted followers for her acerbic takes on popular culture and limitless on-air skirmishes with stars – averaging greater than 1.6 million US viewers a day on the top of her fame.
Now, Williams is popping the highlight again on herself in ‘The place is Wendy Williams?’, a two-part Lifetime documentary airing later this month.
Rising up within the largely white New Jersey seaside city of Asbury Park, most of Williams’s associates had been white – and she or he most popular rock music to hip hop.
‘I used to be a multicultural lady who occurs to be black,’ she later recalled.
In 2021, she revealed she was ‘date raped’ whereas at school – the place she first began taking cocaine – and later suffered the identical destiny by the hands of the late 80s R&B singer Sherrick, after interviewing him on the radio. ‘These kinds of issues occur to ladies on a regular basis,’ she mentioned.
Realizing that radio was a faster path to the celebrity she craved than TV, she opted to pursue the previous.
She bought her first radio job in 1986, working as a DJ for a small station within the US Virgin Islands. However she most popular stirring up controversy to cueing up information.
In the meantime, with extra money, her cocaine abuse escalated into full dependancy – lasting at the very least a decade.
By her personal admission, her reliance on what she known as the ‘white girl’ grew to become so nice that she’d often cease in conjunction with the highway whereas driving between engagements and snort as much as three grams a day.
She additionally took crack, admitting 5 years in the past: ‘Crack is wack — nevertheless it was superb to me at a selected silly level in my life.’
She has mentioned the cocaine helped suppress her urge for food and gave her the ‘chemical braveness’ she wanted. She has additionally described herself as a ‘functioning addict’ whose bosses cynically realized she was too useful to be taken off air so she may get therapy.
Williams says she lastly kicked her behavior within the late Nineties – with out going to rehab.
By 1990, she had a morning present on a New York’s Kiss FM – the primary of a string of Large Apple and Philadelphia music stations the place her scurrilous gossiping about celebrities and rappers – her specialty was outing macho performers as homosexual – began fierce feuds and drew calls for from the likes of Invoice Cosby and music-mogul Russell Simmons that she be taken off-air.
It was round this time that Williams began to herself turn into a subject of tabloid gossip when she began courting Eric B, of rap duo Eric B and Rakim.
She rapidly grew to become pregnant however had an abortion. ‘It was one of many loneliest experiences of my life,’ she later mentioned.
Extra romantic heartbreak would comply with. Regardless of admitting she has a weak spot for ‘thugs’, she married mild-mannered first husband Bert Girigorie, who labored in her radio station’s gross sales and advertising and marketing division, in 1994.
It was a union destined to fail – with the pair even reportedly bickering throughout their honeymoon in Rio de Janeiro. They had been divorced after simply 5 months.
By her personal admission, her reliance on cocaine grew to become so nice that she’d often cease in conjunction with the highway whereas driving between engagements and snort as much as three grams a day.
She additionally took crack, admitting 5 years in the past: ‘Crack is wack. Nevertheless it was superb to me at a selected silly level in my life.’
Williams met second husband, Kevin Hunter, the identical yr however they did not marry till 1999. He grew to become her agent and she or he suffered three miscarriages earlier than giving beginning to their son Kevin in 2000.
A month after he was born, Williams found Hunter was having an affair.
Motherhood did not soften Williams’s ferocity on radio.
In reality, she had her most notorious on-air spat, with Whitney Houston, in 2003 after she grilled the celebrity about her troubled marriage to rapper Bobby Brown, her intercourse life and her breast implants, which Williams indelicately in comparison with ‘two baseballs on a stick’.
Three years later, she provoked extra movie star angst when she revealed that the spouse of Technique Man, aka Wu-Tang Clan rapper Clifford Smith, had most cancers earlier than the couple had even been capable of inform their family members.
After all, radio could not comprise a planet-sized ego like hers endlessly.
In 2008, she moved to TV to start the four-days-a-week ‘Wendy Williams Present’.
Williams toned down essentially the most salacious content material for daytime TV, however did not let up on her critiques of fellow stars.
She was continuously accused of going too far. In 2016, she questioned why singer Kesha hadn’t filmed her alleged sexual abuse by a report producer.
She additionally variously instructed Beyoncé was silly, wished Britney Spears’s household would die, and mocked Joaquin Phoenix’s cleft-lip scar.
In 2018, she took one among many swipes at political correctness when she defended youngster intercourse offender R Kelly and mentioned she was ‘sick of this Me Too motion’.
In 2020, it was the flip of homosexual and trans folks to really feel her displeasure: ‘Cease sporting our skirts and our heels,’ she barked.
However by then, she had extra severe issues than indignant viewers.
Her well being points first grew to become obvious when she dramatically fainted dwell on air in 2017, regaining consciousness after an over-long emergency industrial break. On the time, some suspected she had faked the incident to get consideration.
In 2019, she lastly cut up from her dishonest second husband Kevin Hunter, after he had a child with one other lady.
Throughout a stint in rehab for her consuming, she employed a non-public detective to comply with Hunter – discovering that he had a home along with his mistress simply 9 miles from their very own $2 million household dwelling in Livingston, New Jersey.
She later revealed to followers she was staying in a sober-living facility in Florida, reportedly being handled for alcohol and tablet dependancy.
In 2019, she lastly cut up from her dishonest second husband Kevin Hunter (pictured), after he had a child with one other lady.
She later revealed to followers she was staying in a sober-living facility in Florida, reportedly being handled for alcohol and tablet dependancy.
She additionally mentioned she’d been struggling for years with Graves’ Illness, which might trigger an overactive thyroid (with signs together with, amongst different issues, the bulging eyes that now afflict her) and lymphedema, which might trigger the legs and arms to swell.
Behind the scenes of her present, workers described how Williams was falling to items.
Producers on at the very least 25 events needed to query her sobriety to bosses. Insiders mentioned they’d uncover ‘bottles [of alcohol] up within the ceiling tiles and different bizarre locations within the workplace’.
By the summer season of 2021, Williams was spending most of her time in hospitals and at medical doctors’ surgical procedures.
When her present returned to screens that fall, it was as an alternative offered by a collection of visitor hosts – earlier than ending abruptly in June 2022, with its eponymous host absent from the ultimate episode.
‘The life that I am residing proper now could be my greatest life, and I’ve no guilt about saying that,’ she mentioned in a 2021 interview. ‘I like who I’m, so I’ve no regrets.’
Judging by her current documentary trailer and the information of her dementia prognosis, her ‘greatest life’ could also be properly behind her.
