Wendy Williams gets promising news from psychiatric evaluation on dementia diagnosis amid guardianship fight

Wendy Williams may have gotten a major boost in her attempts to end her guardianship.

During her trip to New York City’s Lenox Hill Hospital on Monday from the assisted-living facility where she has been forced to live, the 60-year-old former talk show host was evaluated by a psychiatrist.

And on Monday, sources told TMZ that Williams received a perfect score on a ‘capacity test’ administered by the psychiatrist. 

DailyMail.com has reached out to a representative for Williams for comment.

According to the sources, Wendy was administered a 10-item questionnaire that was designed to determine her awareness and decision-making abilities, and she scored 10 out of 10 on the test.

Although one test alone doesn’t give a full picture of her mental capacity, the fact that she passed the test with flying colors may indicate that she is far more aware than her guardian has indicated.

Williams had previously been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia and aphasia.

However, sources clarified that the exam Williams underwent was not to dispute her dementia diagnosis.

However, the results of the test will reportedly be shared with the judge who has been overseeing her guardianship.

In recent weeks, Wendy has been making an effort to speak to the press to make her case that she has improved and should be able to manage her care — and money — on her own.

Williams PR push is set to expand later this week when she is scheduled to make her first national television appearance since her dementia diagnosis. 

It was previously reported that Williams’ visit to the hospital was preceded by NYPD officers visiting her at her assisted-living facility to perform a wellness check.

Sources told TMZ on Monday that Gina Monterroso, a caretaker who is independent of Williams’ guardianship, had allegedly ordered her trip to the hospital and the cognitive test.

It’s unclear if Monterroso is an employee of the assisted-living facility or what her immediate connection to Williams is.

According to TMZ, New York’s Adult Protective Services agency is now conducting an investigation into her guardianship and her stay at the facility, where she is confined to a restrictive memory unit, where she appears to have fewer privileges than patients on other floors.

Williams has denied that she has memory issues, and therefore she doesn’t think she should be deprived of her privileges. 

She also reportedly doesn’t have freedom of movement on that floor.

Although her guardian claimed to Vanity Fair earlier this month that ‘Nobody’s saying that Wendy can’t leave a building’ after she had two trips to Florida for her son’s graduation and her father’s 94th birthday, Williams previously said she had only been allowed to leave the building twice in a month, and she needs the approval of an attendant before she is allowed to leave her floor.

According to the publication, APS has been interviewing people close to the gossip monger, including her niece, Alex Finnie, whom employees reportedly interviewed on Monday.

Wendy also reportedly spoken with the organization recently. 

The NYPD is also reportedly continuing to investigate the circumstances of her stay in the facility. 

Williams will be making her first national television appearance since her shocking dementia diagnosis, ABC revealed on Sunday.

She will be joining the ladies of The View on Friday, March 14, even as she wages a legal battle to end her guardianship.

Wendy has lately made attempts to speak out via phone from her assisted-living facility, where she has been kept on a restrictive memory unit that gives her few privileges and little right of movement.

However, she got a rare breath of fresh air last month when her guardianship and the facility allowed her to fly to Miami to celebrate her father’s 94th birthday for a few days.

Although Williams will be back on TV, it’s unclear if viewers will get to see her live, as ABC’s announcement indicates that she will be doing a phone interview with the View hosts, who include Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Sara Haines, Sunny Hostin, Ana Navarro and Alyssa Farah Griffin.

However, Wendy has recently been seen live in some phone interviews, as she has conducted them while standing against the window to her room at the assisted-living facility, which has allowed a camera to catch her reactions in real time. 

According to The View’s schedule, Wendy’s phone interview will also feature Ginalisa Monterroso, the founder and president of Connect Care Advisory Group.

In its schedule announcement, ABC boasted that The View is ‘America’s most-watched daytime talk show for the fifth consecutive season.

The long-running show, now in its 28th season, has had a rotating line up female hosts over the years.

Whoopi Goldberg, Sara Haines, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Sunny Hostin and Joy Behar — the only holdover from the original lineup — currently host the talk show.

Back in 2022, Williams was placed under a court-appointed guardianship after Wells Fargo reported several large withdrawals from her bank account that it deemed suspicious. 

She was then placed under a court-appointed guardianship, which took control of her finances and her medical decisions, with Sabrina Morrissey acting as her guardian.

After Williams was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia and aphasia in February 2024, Morrissey later said the gossip monger was ‘cognitively impaired and permanently incapacitated.’ 

But in recent months, a seemingly lucid Wendy has been disputing that she’s impaired and begging to regain her freedom.

Last month, TMZ reported on the circumstances in which Wendy was allegedly moved to a more restrictive part of her assisted-living facility, which may have contributed to her lack of trips outside of the building.

According to an employee who is described as having had many interactions with Wendy since her arrival, she initially was given a room on the building’s third floor, where residents are allowed to come and go as they please. 

However, things went south early on in her tenure when she went up to the restaurant and bar located on the facility’s top floor for an extended lunch. 

According to the employee, Wendy ordered several alcoholic drinks and was noticeably drunk for a significant amount of time. 

The facility supervisors allegedly learned of the drunken escapade and were upset that she was served, as she has reportedly had issues with problem drinking in the past. 

In response to the drunken lunch, Wendy was allegedly relocated to a new room on the memory unit on the facility’s fifth floor. 

Because many of the occupants there suffer from dementia and other memory issues, they aren’t able to use the elevator on their own. 

The new location meant Wendy was prohibited from going up to the restaurant and drinking, though it’s unclear if she is not supposed to leave the floor at all or if she can venture out with someone supervising.

However, there was a hiccup with the reassignment, as the memory unit didn’t have any open rooms, so Wendy was allegedly forced to stay in her third-floor room while employees guarded the door and prevented her from leaving. 

According to the insider, employees at the facility lied to the talk show host and told her that the restaurant was closed for renovations, despite it apparently being open the entire time. 

After a few days a room reportedly opened up and she was able to be moved to the fifth floor, where she has remained ever since. 

The confinement and alleged falsehoods fed to Wendy are concerning, as the employee claims that her memory is not suffering. 

‘Wendy doesn’t have good and bad days. She’s the same all the time,’ they claimed to TMZ. 

‘You can tell her something today and two weeks later she’ll remember it. Her memory is fine.’ 

In February, Wendy signed an affidavit in which she asked the judge overseeing her guardianship case to end the arrangement, TMZ reported.

In the legally binding document, Williams reportedly said she has ‘regained capacity’ to function independently, and she said she no longer requires a guardian to oversee her.

She has a guardianship overseen by Sabrina Morrissey, which was instituted in 2022.

She still has several steps ahead of her before she can end the guardianship, however, and the judge will ultimately need to be swayed by her if she hopes to regain her freedom.

In order to do that, Williams will next attempt to prove that she does not have frontotemporal dementia, contrary to how doctors had previously diagnosed her. 

She averred in her affidavit that she was not suffering from the neurological condition, and sources told TMZ that she would be seeing a doctor for a new evaluation to hopefully confirm as much.

Notably, frontotemporal dementia is a permanent and progressive condition, so the former Wendy Williams Show host hopes that her apparent improvement in functioning will indicate that she couldn’t be suffering from the disease. 

Williams recently hired a new attorney to help her end the guardianship, and they were responsible for selecting the new doctor she will be seeing. 

According to the publications sources, her attorney plans to file an Emergency Order to Show Cause the day after the testing, which should force the judge to weigh in on ending the guardianship.

She’s hoping the judge will agree and end things then and there, but if they deny the request and keep the guardianship as its currently constituted, Williams will allegedly request that her case go before a jury who can determine if she’s able to care for herself and run her own finances without the need of a guardian figure. 

Williams recently delved into the circumstances that she believes led to her being placed under a guardianship during a recent chat with TMZ.

In an appearance on its 2 Angry Men podcast, she revealed that she planned to travel down to Miami — where several of her family members live — for a weekend to celebrate her father’s 94th birthday.

The trip represents the first time in months she’ll be able to spend time with family, but it will also mark a reunion with her son Kevin Hunter Jr. 

Williams had previously revealed that her guardianship was kicked off after her bank, Wells Fargo, reported that several large withdrawals had been made from her account, seemingly without her authorization.

She has claimed that her son Kevin and others made the withdrawals, though it’s unclear if she thinks he was working with others to take her money.

For his part, her son has denied any wrongdoing.

‘My son, he overstepped his boundaries,’ Williams claimed in a video interview filmed from her window for the publication’s new documentary Saving Wendy. ‘He was inappropriately using my money without telling me crap about it.’

She said the alleged action caused the bank to freeze her account, which stopped any potential stealing, but it also left her without any access to her money.

When asked who was ‘influencing’ her financially, Williams began to cry and said, ‘My son is a really good person.

‘But at this point, he is a horrible person to me,’ she continued.

Williams went on to allege that ‘other people’ might have been influencing her son and spending time with him at her apartment in Miami.

She mentioned a fishy transaction in which Kevin had allegedly wanted to rent a boat for around $1,500, before alleged renting on for $130,000, according to Wells Fargo, which he allegedly blamed on the bank, though his mother didn’t buy that explanation.

According to documents obtained by TMZ, the judge overseeing Williams case said in September 2024 that, ‘While Mr. Hunter, [her son, Kevin] apologized for past mistakes and inappropriate behavior, the court is not convinced that he can keep her safe and wouldn’t willingly or unwittingly expose her to financial exploitation.’ 

Williams noted that she planned to see her son at her father’s birthday — assuming he showed up. 

‘I will see him at a particular place, at a particular location. I don’t want to say too much,’ she said, though she didn’t care to say more about their current relationship.