Wendy Williams details ‘prison’-like facility she’s in amid dementia battle
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Wendy Williams is speaking out in a rare interview to broadcast the alleged conditions she is currently living in.
The iconic TV and radio personality, who is battling aphasia and frontotemporal lobe dementia, called in to The Breakfast Club on Thursday, January 16, to detail how she is at a facility she compared to “prison.”
The 60-year-old Williams, whose niece was on the call with her, told former colleague Charlamagne Tha God that she is “not cognitively impaired” — the term used by guardian Sabrina Morrissey and her legal team in November 2024 court documents. The paperwork, obtained by The Sun, alleged that the former talk show host is “afflicted by early-onset dementia and, as a result, has become cognitively impaired and permanently incapacitated.”
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“I feel like I am in prison,” Williams told The Breakfast Club hosts. “I’m in this place where the people are in their 90s and their 80s and their 70s. There’s something wrong with these people here on this floor.”
According to Charlamagne, the former Wendy Williams Show host is not “allow[ed] … to leave or have visitors” at the high-security facility. “So you can’t even leave and take a walk if you wanted to, or take a trip or visit family members.”
Williams called the treatment “emotional abuse” and opined that the “system is broken.”
Williams announced her aphasia and FTD diagnosis in February 2024, two years after Bruce Willis’ family shared the news that he was suffering from aphasia. (He was diagnosed specifically with FTD in February 2023.)
Per the Mayo Clinic, “aphasia is a disorder that affects how you communicate. It can impact your speech, as well as the way you write and understand both spoken and written language.”
FTD, per the site, is “an umbrella term for a group of brain diseases that mainly affect the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain … [which] are associated with personality, behavior and language.” Symptoms of the disease “depend on which part of the brain is affected,” the clinic explains, noting that “some people with frontotemporal dementia have changes in their personalities [and can] become socially inappropriate and may be impulsive or emotionally indifferent. Others lose the ability to properly use language.”
