Wendy Williams asked for a guardianship but didn’t think her entire life would be taken away

Wendy Williams is currently waging a public fight against a guardianship she was ordered into by a court in 2022, but a close associate of the legendary host says that Williams originally advocated for the arrangement.

Ginalisa Monterroso, Williams’ health care advocate, tells PEOPLE that while Williams initially consented to being overseen by the court-appointed legal guardian Sabrina Morrissey, she would never have agreed had she known how many legal rights and protections would be stripped from her.

Williams has “no rights,” within her current arrangement, Monterroso says, adding, “Somebody in prison has more rights than a person put under a guardianship.”

Entertainment Weekly has reached out to a rep for Williams for comment.

The move for a guardianship was first initiated in 2022, when the Wendy Williams Show host revealed that her former financial advisor, Lori Schiller, had advocated for the bank to deny Williams access to all of her financial accounts, assets, and statements because she “was of unsound mind.”

It was after Williams’ son, Kevin Hunter Jr., used his power of attorney to withdraw a large sum from Williams’ account that Wells Fargo escalated from blocking Williams’ access to her accounts to requesting she be placed under a temporary financial guardianship. Under New York state law, however, that temporary guardianship quickly evolved into a full legal guardianship, which means Williams can no longer manage her own bank account, decide how her money is spent, choose where to live, vote, marry, or select her own doctors. She checked into a wellness facility, and currently resides in a luxury high-rise assisted-living facility in New York.

“She wanted to make sure nobody’s in her money and she would be fine,” Monterroso said. “She kind of felt like, ‘Hey, I have the court. They’re going to sign me a money person. I’m going to be good.’ In no way did she think that our whole life was going to be taken away from her.”

In Lifetime’s Where Is Wendy Williams? documentary, Hunter Jr. denied the allegations, claiming that during the time she was in his care in Florida, she signed off on all financial decisions and has always spent large amounts of money due to her extravagant lifestyle. Details of Williams’ current financial holdings have not been made public.

 “I’ve never taken [money] without her consent,” said Hunter Jr. in the documentary.

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“A lot of people would be like, ‘Well, I would question [the guardianship] more,” Monterroso said. “But when everything is happening so quickly and the bank is saying, ‘Somebody’s trying to take your money and there’s something going on, you’re just trying to kind of save yourself… Why would you not trust the courts, right? Why would the courts become your enemy?”

Williams was diagnosed with aphasia and frontotemporal dementia in February 2024, and that November, Morrissey declared that Williams had become “cognitively impaired, permanently disabled, and legally incapacitated” as a result.

But Williams now contests that diagnosis, and is fighting for freedom from her guardianship.

The beloved media personality has begun speaking out about the restrictive conditions of her guardianship, likening the arrangement to “prison” and “emotional abuse” in a January interview with The Breakfast Club. Following an interview with TMZ from her room at the assisted living facility in which Williams professed to being in good mental health, NYPD officers performed a wellness check and subsequently escorted Williams to a hospital.

Monterroso confirmed that Williams passed a series of mental capacity exams conducted at the hospital, and now “feels as if she has a voice and change to get out… She’s able to get counsel, everybody’s looking at the case — and there’s movement. People are listening to her now, so she’s confident that she’s going to continue to fight.”