Wendy Williams Wants Out
Plus: A perimenopause survey!!!
You’re reading Wait, Really?, a newsletter unpacking what’s in the culture, with a feminist spin. To get new posts in your inbox and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at the signup below.
“It’s Wendy.”
The call came in on a Saturday night while I was out at a bar. NO CALLER ID.
I ran to the bathroom — single stall — and put my phone on speaker, furiously taking notes.
It was Wendy Williams — shock jockette, fixture of hip hop radio in the 90s and 2000s, coiner of the campy catchphrase, “How you doin?” and, for nearly 13 years, beloved host of The Wendy Williams Show, among the top-rated shows in daytime TV.
For most of my adult life, Williams had been the gossip queen of New York: over-the-top, outrageous, always knew who was sleeping with who, who was secretly gay, and was willing to ask the thing that everybody wanted to know but nobody was brave enough to say. To her fans (millions of listeners; millions more who tuned into her TV show every day), she was beloved; to her foes (Diddy; Will Smith; 2Pac, among others) she was feared… but also respected.
And yet when Wendy called me last month, she had not spoken publicly in many months. She had rarely been seen in public in three years. For a two month period in late 2021 and early 2022, she’d actually gone missing — her manager, her staff, and her financial advisor all unable to find her. But what had happened to her since — did she have dementia? was she on a drug binge? was she being held against her will? — was something of a mystery.
What I knew from the tabloids, which were always first to the scene and very frequently wrong, was that Wendy had been placed in a court-appointed guardianship — the result of something having to do with her son, her ex husband’s lawyer, and money. But the rest of the story was murky: sealed in private court documents; subject to court-mandated gag orders; surrounded by wild rumors (Was that person falling asleep in a Louis Vuitton store a body double? Had Diddy set her up?) and warring accusations from family, friends and business associates. Nobody seemed to really know what was going on with Wendy, and I wanted to find out.
What I would learn, over the course of months reporting this story, was that Williams, 61, had indeed been placed under a financial guardianship in March 2022, after she showed up at a Florida bank, out of it and unable to speak, and tried to withdraw $25,000. The incident came after months of concerning behavior documented by her financial advisor, in which Williams said she believed her family was “stealing” from her; in which people called her bank trying to change the passwords and contacts on her account, seemingly impersonating Wendy; and a call to the Miami police department. It all followed numerous trips to rehab facilities, documented health struggles that led to abandoning her TV show (Williams suffers from Grave’s Disease); and a diagnosis, according to her family, of alcohol-induced dementia.
But that the way she was now living — on a locked floor of a high-end assisted living facility in Hudson Yards; without access to a cell phone or internet, and only able to make outgoing phone calls from a landline — was far more restrictive than anything financial. Williams had agreed to the initial guardianship in 2022; but last year, she withdrew her consent in court — and has called the whole setup a “prison.” Recently, she dropped a note from a crack in her fifth-floor window: It read, “HELP!!”
As I would learn, getting out of a guardianship is far more difficult than getting in. It is a system that stripes tens of of thousands of people of their rights; the vast majority of them over 65 and low income; 68 percent of them women, and with absolutely abysmal monitoring systems. (If you’d care to dig deep, Pro Publica did a deeply reported series on the flaws in New York’s guardianship system, that came out last year).
But Wendy being Wendy, she is not going away quietly. She has begun a campaign on her own behalf: to prove to the world that she was the old Wendy, that she is capable of caring for herself, that she still matters — and that she wants out. The only problem is it may not matter.
You can read my full article, “Wendy Williams Wants Out,” in New York Magazine here.
(Don’t have a subscription? You can get a copy on newsstands, or view my illicit PDF here. But pls consider subscribing!)
Female Readers Ages 30-55: The Perimenopause Survey You Didn’t Know You Needed
In OTHER news, a few months back, I wrote a very different kind of feature for New York about what I was calling “The Perimenopause Gold Rush” — an absolutely unhinged amount of products/serums/supplements/creams targeted at millennial women like me, who were probably also up in the middle of the night unable to sleep googling their symptoms, and who were willing to buy anything to make them stop.
Like me, these were women who assumed it would be years before we started experiencing anything remotely “menopausal” only to start having all sorts of odd things happening to our bodies (itchy skin, alcohol intolerance, heart palpitations, night sweats) that were either signs that we were dying, had actually gone crazy, or were in the throes of perimenopause — a term that didn’t even exist until recently and was most certainly not on my radar.
Turns out, like most things related to women’s health, that’s because we know absolutely fucking nothing about the decade-long period before menopause, which can start as young as 30 (!!!!!!) and can last between two and 10 years. And despite reading All Fours and being very jealous of Miranda July’s sexy dancing videos and hot body on Instagram, Perimenopause is WAY LESS SEXY than it looks on Miranda July.
I could go on and on here, but you can read my many words on the subject if you’d like to know more — which, honestly, if you are in the age group described, please do and educate yourself!!! But the reason I am saying all of this is because one of my fabulous sources from that story, who is the LITERAL ONLY PERSON studying this period of life (I’m not even being dramatic; there is only one study of any kind on this subject published in a medical journal, and it was published by my source, Nina Coslov, in 2021) is fielding a new survey of women during this period of life.
The crazy thing is, Nina is not even a medical researcher. She is a business consultant who, at the age of 42, found herself so enraged by the lack of data on this period of life she decided to partner with menopause researchers and epidemiologists and collect the data herself. She now runs a nonprofit called Women Living Better.
So sad.