Wendy Williams Lawsuit Wants All Profits From Lifetime Documentary To Fund Medical Care

Wendy Williams' legal team wants all proceeds from the Lifetime documentary to cover her medical care.

Wendy Williams’ legal team is after Lifetime for the revealing documentary into her health and finances and believes she is owed compensation.

A legal complaint against Lifetime’s parent company, A+E Networks, was revised on Monday to request all profits from the project be directed toward Williams’s medical care. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the lawsuit accuses the network of taking advantage of Williams’ declining mental and physical health and paying her a mere $82,000 while others “likely earned millions.”

“This is a paltry sum for the use of highly invasive, humiliating footage that portrayed her in the confusing throes of dementia, while Defendants, who have profited on the streaming of the program, have likely already earned millions,” the complaint filed on Sept. 16 in New York County Supreme Court states.

The project chronicled her life over the course of a year, capturing her decline as she grappled with family issues, fame, and unrestrained alcohol consumption. Many revelations were made by Williams, who admitted her financial struggles onscreen.

“I have no money, and I’m going to tell you something,” Williams said. “… If it happens to me, it could happen to you.”

The documentary cites Williams, her son, Kevin Hunter Jr., and her jeweler-turned-former manager, Will Selby, as executive producers.

The lawsuit was first filed by Williams’ temporary guardian, Sabrina Morrissey, in March, arguing that the contract the company arranged to film the documentary was allegedly invalid since Williams lacked the legal and mental capacity to consent to her participation at the time. Producers had promised the documentary would be “positive and beneficial” to her image, but instead, it offered the public an unfiltered look into her health, leading to the official announcement of Williams’ diagnoses of frontotemporal dementia and aphasia.

The complaint criticizes the filmmakers for depicting Williams as a “laughingstock and drunkard, implicitly blaming her for her own suffering” by including unflattering footage, such as images of her nearly bald and without her wig.

Morrissey “was stunned and appalled by this, as [Williams] insists on wearing her wig for all meetings, and she would never, ever have consented and allowed herself to be filmed for the public without her wig for public consumption,” the complaint states.

Robert Kaplan has joined Williams’ legal team alongside Ellen Holloman. Together, they revised the filing that calls out Williams’ former manager, Will Selby, for facilitating the ex-talk show host’s involvement in the documentary on claims that he would have creative control.

The revised complaint calls out the defendants for how they allegedly “viciously and shamelessly exploited Wendy Williams for their own profit while she was obviously incapacitated and suffering from dementia,” Kaplan said in a statement.

In addition to A+E Networks, the lawsuit names Lifetime Entertainment Services, Creature Films, and producer Mark Ford as defendants in the case, alongside A&E and EOne Productions. Morrissey accuses EOne of drafting a one-sided on-camera talent agreement after having already filmed a “disheveled” Williams.

“This agreement was submitted after W.W.H. had already been filmed by Defendants while she was clearly disheveled, not mentally present, and confused,” the filing states. “No person who witnessed W.W.H. in these circumstances could possibly have believed that she was capable of consenting to an agreement to film or to the filming itself.”

The controversial documentary premiered in February to blockbuster ratings for Lifetime. The network cites it as its biggest nonfiction debut in two years. The documentary featured footage from seven months of Williams’ decline in recent years up until her admission to a health facility for cognitive issues last year.