Wendy Williams’s household concern the worst after dementia prognosis age 59

‘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 not 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. ‘Keep the bottle there,’ she shouts.

It’s 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 Show, which lasted 14 collection till its abrupt cancellation in 2021, the information that she’s broke is – if true – notably surprising.

Williams amassed a military of devoted followers for her acerbic takes on popular culture and countless 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 ‘Where is Wendy Williams?’, a two-part Lifetime documentary airing later this month, and boasting ‘unparalleled entry’ to Williams – which is hardly stunning provided that she’s an government producer.

‘I’ve no cash, and I’m gonna inform you one thing,’ she says, staring manically on the digital camera. ‘If it occurs to me, it might occur to you.’

Later, somebody out of shot enquires her if she’s seen a neurologist. ‘To discover out if I’m loopy?’ Williams asks. ‘Mmm-hmm.’

Her son Kevin Hunter Jr, 23, observes: ‘Mom has achieved an awesome job making it look like all the things is OK at all times, however in actuality, there’s something flawed happening.’

In reality, there’s been so much flawed with Wendy Williams for years.

The monetary guardianship which a New York decide positioned on her in 2022 – after she was decided to be an ‘incapacitated particular person’ – was the end result of myriad issues together with a decades-long cocaine dependancy, alcoholism, and problems from Graves’ illness – an immune system dysfunction.

On Thursday, Williams’s ‘care crew’ issued a press launch stating that she was identified final yr with frontotemporal dementia and first progressive aphasia – notably, the identical situations that afflict Bruce Willis.

The information got here simply in the future after an explosive People journal interview with a few of her household, through which they claimed they ‘do not know what the hell is occurring [with Williams]’ and that solely her court-appointed guardian is aware of which well being facility she is at present staying in.

‘The individuals who love her can not see her,’ Williams’s mom and sister informed the magazine. 

Over the years, Williams has fortunately shared together with her viewers a lot of her private challenges resembling her yo-yoing weight, cosmetic surgery obsession, a string of miscarriages and the humiliating breakdown of a wedding to her former supervisor, Kevin Hunter.

But again then, she was a multi-millionaire with a massively profitable present that even usually beat Ellen DeGeneres’s viewing figures.

Clearly, her life has obtained very a lot worse since then.

And, because of her limitless capability for private disclosure and shameless attention-seeking, the roadmap to Williams’s spectacular rise and fall is one which she’s been more than pleased to put out over time.

As a toddler she was such a loudmouth her schoolteacher mother and father developed a code to get her to relax at social features: ‘TL’ or ‘TF’, for ‘too loud’ or ‘too quick’.

She struggled together with her weight from a younger age – a crippling insecurity that was solely fueled by strain from her mother and father to manage her consuming – and located solace in music and movie star magazines.

Growing up within the largely white New Jersey seashore city of Asbury Park, most of Williams’s pals had been white – and he or she most popular rock music to hip hop.

‘I used to be a multicultural girl who occurs to be black,’ she later recalled.

In 2021, she revealed she was ‘date raped’ whereas in 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. ‘Those kinds of issues occur to women 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 obtained her first radio job in 1986, working as a DJ for a small station within the US Virgin Islands. But she most popular stirring up controversy to cueing up data.

Meanwhile, with more cash, her cocaine abuse escalated into full dependancy – lasting not less than a decade.

By her personal admission, her reliance on what she referred to as the ‘white woman’ turned so nice that she’d usually cease along side the street 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 — however it was excellent 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 worthwhile to be taken off air so she might get therapy.

Williams nonetheless insists 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 Big 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 Bill Cosby and music-mogul Russell Simmons that she be taken off-air.

It was round this time that Williams began to herself develop into a subject of tabloid gossip when she began courting Eric B, of rap duo Eric B and Rakim.

She rapidly turned pregnant however had an abortion. ‘It was one of many loneliest experiences of my life,’ she later mentioned.

More romantic heartbreak would observe. Despite admitting she has a weak point 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.

Williams met second husband, Kevin Hunter, the identical yr however they did not marry till 1999. He turned her agent and he or she suffered three miscarriages earlier than giving delivery 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 famous person 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 Method Man, aka Wu-Tang Clan rapper Clifford Smith, had most cancers earlier than the couple had even been in a position to inform their family members.

Of course, radio could not include a planet-sized ego like hers endlessly.

In 2008, she moved to TV to start the four-days-a-week ‘Wendy Williams Show’.

Williams toned down probably the most salacious content material for daytime TV, however did not let up on her critiques of fellow stars.

She was often accused of going too far. In 2016, she questioned why singer Kesha hadn’t filmed her alleged sexual abuse by a file producer.

She additionally variously advised Beyoncé was silly, wished Britney Spears’s household would die, and mocked Joaquin Phoenix’s cleft-lip scar.

In 2018, she took considered one of 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 individuals to really feel her displeasure: ‘Stop sporting our skirts and our heels,’ she barked.

But by then, she had extra critical issues than offended viewers.

Her well being points first turned obvious when she dramatically fainted dwell on air in 2017, regaining consciousness after an over-long emergency industrial break. At the time, some suspected she had faked the incident to get consideration.

In 2019, she lastly break up from her dishonest second husband Kevin Hunter, after he had a child with one other girl.

During a stint in rehab for her consuming, she employed a non-public detective to observe Hunter – discovering that he had a home together with his mistress simply 9 miles from their very own $2 million household residence 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 capsule dependancy.

She additionally mentioned she’d been struggling for years with Graves’ Disease, which may trigger an overactive thyroid (with signs together with, amongst different issues, the bulging eyes that now afflict her) and lymphedema, which may trigger the legs and arms to swell.

Behind the scenes of her present, workers described how Williams was falling to items.

Producers on not less than 25 events needed to query her sobriety to bosses. Insiders mentioned they might 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 a substitute introduced 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’m residing proper now’s my finest 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 latest documentary trailer and the information of her dementia prognosis, her ‘finest life’ could also be properly behind her.