People Magazine’s cover story this week is all about Wendy Williams and what the hell happened to her. Throughout 2019-2021, Wendy still had her very popular talk show, although the cracks were visible to everyone – she was drunk on air, her marriage (to a manipulative cheater) was falling apart, her health fell off a cliff and on and on. In 2021-22, she lost her talk show and by that point, she had been in and out of rehabs and sober houses for a while. Then she plotted a comeback with a podcast and some kind of docuseries about her comeback. The documentarians ended up getting a very different story. So where is Wendy now? That’s what a new Lifetime documentary, Where Is Wendy Williams?, tries to answer.
It’s been two and a half years since Wendy Williams asked her final “How you doin’?” on TV, and since then, the larger-than-life personality has remained mostly quiet as rumors have swirled about her well-being. Now the former Wendy Williams Show host’s family is speaking out for the first time in this week’s PEOPLE cover story about what went down during this dark period, as Williams’ life devolved into the exact kind of drama she once would have gossiped about during her Hot Topics segment.
“We’ve all seen the images over the last few months — and, really, few years — of what has seemed like a spiral for my aunt,” says Williams’ niece Alex Finnie, who also appears in the new Lifetime documentary, Where Is Wendy Williams?, premiering Feb. 24. “It was shocking and heartbreaking to see her in this state.”
When the Lifetime documentary crew began filming in August 2022, it set out to follow Williams’ comeback as she prepared to launch a new podcast. The film quickly evolved into something entirely different, as the crew captured Williams (who served as an executive producer on the project) in the throes of alcohol addiction and struggles with health issues including Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder that can cause bulging eyes, and lymphedema, a condition that causes swelling in her feet.
A particularly gut-wrenching scene shows Williams — who turns 60 in July — asking her driver to take her past the former Wendy Williams Show studio, forgetting that he had done so only moments earlier.
“I don’t know what the hell is going on,” her driver says in the documentary. “I think she’s losing memory. She doesn’t know who I am sometimes.”
The documentary crew stopped filming Williams in April 2023. That month, she entered a facility to treat “cognitive issues,” her manager and jeweler Will Selby says in the film. Her son reveals in the documentary that doctors have connected these issues to alcohol use. Williams remains in the facility to this day, and her family says a court-appointed legal guardian is the only person who has unfettered access to her. Her family says they don’t know where she is and cannot call her themselves, but she can call them.
“The people who love her cannot see her,” says Wendy’s sister and Alex’s mom Wanda, 65. “I think the big [question] is: How the hell did we get here?”
People goes through the timeline, with Wendy’s disappearance from her show in 2021 and then Wells Fargo freezing her bank accounts, claiming that she was of “unsound mind.” There were rumors about her ex-husband Kevin Hunter and their son Kevin Jr. Wendy was also appointed a financial guardian but Wendy claims that her guardian stole money from her. I remember when the Wells Fargo thing happened and there were A LOT of conversation about what led to that and how a bank could do that to someone as high-profile as Wendy. The Lifetime documentary should be a tragic must-watch because I’m still not exactly clear what the f–k really happened. I still believe her ex had a big part in it though.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, cover courtesy of People.