Wendy Williams is ‘permanently incapacitated’ by dementia

When Lifetime launched its contentious “The place Is Wendy Williams?” docuseries earlier this yr, the cable channel credited Williams as an government producer on the mission.

However on the time of the documentary’s manufacturing, the previous speak present host — who final yr was recognized with early-onset dementia and aphasia — didn’t even “have the capability to consent to being filmed,” her guardian Sabrina Morrissey stated in a criticism filed in New York County Supreme Court docket.

“As is patently apparent from the very first jiffy of the Program itself,” Morrissey stated in her September criticism, Williams “was extremely weak and clearly incapable of consenting to being filmed, a lot much less humiliated and exploited.” Final month, the case was moved to federal court docket.

The criticism asks that the defendants pay Williams unspecified compensatory and punitive damages and asks the court docket to order the defendants to completely cease airing the present.

The defendants within the case — Lifetime mum or dad firm A&E Tv Networks, Lifetime Leisure Providers, EOne Productions, Creature Movies and the doc’s government producer Mark Ford — this month filed counterclaims in opposition to Morrissey.

Representatives for A&E, Lifetime, Creature Movies and Ford didn’t reply instantly Tuesday to The Occasions’ request for remark.

Introduced in 4 episodes, “The place Is Wendy Williams?” was billed as a “uncooked and compelling documentary” that adopted the media character’s life after “The Wendy Williams Present” was canceled in February 2022. The cancellation got here as Williams’ bodily and psychological well being worsened. Filming on the doc started in August 2022, shortly after Williams was positioned beneath monetary guardianship, and stopped in April 2023 “resulting from her poor well being,” based on court docket paperwork reviewed by The Occasions.

A month later, Morrissey stated in her submitting, Williams was recognized with frontotemporal lobe dementia and first progressive aphasia — each debilitating neurodegenerative illnesses that trigger issues with conduct and language, per the Nationwide Institute on Getting old — which have since left her “cognitively impaired and completely incapacitated.”

After Williams’ prognosis, Morrissey continued, she “moderately assumed that the mission was defunct, provided that no contract was ever finalized and that [Williams] was clearly not engaged on a podcast or specializing in her profession at the moment.” The criticism stated Williams could have signed an “on-camera expertise settlement” after filming had already begun, however Morrissey referred to as such an settlement invalid due to Williams’ incapacity — and since it was by no means shared along with her guardian or the court docket.

“Fully shocked and horrified” when the documentary’s trailer dropped Feb. 2, Morrissey stated she tried to halt its launch, however an appellate decide denied her restraining order request as impermissible prior restraint.

Nowhere in his ruling did the decide “deal with the deserves of the Guardian’s assertion that [Williams] lacked capability to consent,” Morrissey stated in her current submitting, including that regardless of their information of Williams’ diagnoses, the defendants “shamelessly doubled down on their scheme to revenue from the footage that they had wrongfully captured.”

“They did so regardless of their full consciousness that the Program depicted a severely disabled girl who was not accountable for her conduct and who had misplaced the power to make acutely aware and knowledgeable choices all through the Filming,” she stated.

Morrissey stated in her submitting that whereas Lifetime has “profited immensely” from the manufacturing, Williams herself was paid “a paltry $82,000.”

Upon the documentary’s launch in February, government producer Mark Ford informed The Occasions that the crew “by no means would have entered into the mission if we knew that Wendy had dementia,” including, “The mission was signed off by her guardian, her attorneys or managers, her publicist, herself after which, in the end, her household.”

“The deeper we acquired into it, actually, it grew to become extra of a priority [about] what would occur to Wendy if we stopped filming than if we continued,” Ford stated. “We additionally knew that we had the ability to by no means air it. If this movie couldn’t go in a redeeming or constructive path, then I assure you Lifetime by no means would have aired it, and we wouldn’t have been taken with airing it.”