Wendy Williams is locked in a butter lawsuit with Lifetime network, for exploiting her when creating the documentary that aired earlier this year, Media Take Out reported. According to a source who spoke with In Touch, she’s taken a turn for the worse – thanks to Lifetime – and now her fortune is “dwindling.”
Wendy’s legal team is asking Lifetime Channel to pay her medical bills, claiming the cable network cruelly laid her mental and medical woes bare for ratings in a TV documentary about her decline.
Lifetime cameras trailed Wendy for seven months, recording her downward spiral for the two-part documentary Where Is Wendy Williams?.
It aired in February and became one of the most-watched shows in the network’s history. But Wendy received just $82,000 for the project. Wendy is a shrewd businesswoman, and would have never received such a small sum – if she wasn’t exploited during her illness.
“This is a paltry sum for the use of highly invasive, humiliating footage that showed her in the confusing throes of dementia, while defendants, who have profited on the streaming of the program, have likely already earned millions,” her legal team wrote in its complaint against Lifetime and its parent company, A&E Networks.
Wendy’s attorneys previously tried to block the documentary from airing. “No person who witnessed [Wendy] in these circumstances could possibly have believed that she was capable of consenting to an agreement to film,” reads the complaint, which claims Wendy was portrayed as a “laughingstock and drunkard, implicitly responsible for her own continued suffering.”
The former daytime diva, 60, was a ratings sensation with her syndicated TV talk show from 2008 to 2021, when she went MIA to battle Graves’ disease and substance abuse. And in 2023, Wendy was diagnosed with aphasia — a disorder that robs sufferers of the use of language — as well as dementia, and was placed in a wellness facility.
She resurfaced for the first time in 19 months in late August when she was spotted shopping with her son, Kevin Hunter.
“Wendy faces long-term care for the rest of her life, and her wealth has dwindled considerably as she’s no longer able to work,” a source exclusively tells In Touch. “Lifetime should foot the bill for her care, since they made millions exploiting her decline!”
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