TV's ghoulish new low: Dementia-hit Wendy Williams is reduced to a sideshow freak as relatives crawl into her fading spotlight. And, blasts MAUREEN CALLAHAN, it's a heartless and cynical violation even by Hollywood's dirty standards

Wendy Williams built a career saying terrible things, reveling in other people's misfortune, castigating celebrities even as she sought to be one.

But no one, not even Williams, deserves her most terrible fate.

In the ramp-up to a two-part docuseries airing this weekend on Lifetime, Williams's diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia and primary progressive aphasia at the age of 59 has been publicly disclosed.

The timing, even by Hollywood standards, feels heartless and cynical.

Just look to Williams's legal guardian, named by TMZ as Sabrina Morrissey and who has reportedly filed an 11th-hour suit against Lifetime's parent company.

The suit is under seal, but Morrissey has also filed a temporary restraining order, which could be seeking to stop the network from airing the series.

Perhaps the suit was triggered by the pre-publicity barrage we've seen this week.

In the ramp-up to a two-part docuseries airing this weekend on Lifetime, Williams's diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia and primary progressive aphasia at the age of 59 has been publicly disclosed.

The timing, even by Hollywood standards, feels heartless and cynical. Just look to Williams's legal guardian, named by TMZ as Sabrina Morrissey and who has reportedly filed an 11th-hour suit against Lifetime's parent company.

'The Fight to Save Wendy Williams' is People magazine's cover story, bannered with 'Addiction, Health Struggles, A Family in Turmoil'.

Meanwhile, Williams's niece Alex Finnie — an otherwise little-known local Miami news anchor — is getting a taste of the big time, making the rounds at 'Good Morning America' and 'The View'.

It all feels gross. As anyone who loves someone with dementia knows, their personal dignity is the first thing to go.

To have that stripped so very publicly — when it seems Williams doesn't have the cognition to assent — is particularly gruesome.

'Where Is Wendy Williams?' began filming in August 2022, just weeks after she was fired from her talk show. Williams was then 57 and losing the only things that seemed important to her: Her clout, her wealth, her fame.

The documentary was a last-ditch attempt to salvage her reputation, shredded after a lengthy public meltdown involving heavy substance abuse; an on-air collapse, while dressed as the Statue of Liberty; her husband's lengthy extramarital affair, which produced a child; being photographed passed out drunk in a Louis Vuitton store; a grim stint in a run-down communal sober house; and reports that staffers on her show often found liquor bottles stashed all over the set, even under the ceiling panels.

'All I know is how to be famous', Williams says in the doc's trailer. 'I have no money.'

At her height, Williams was making $10 million a year as host of her titular talk show.

She had an unlikely fan in John Oliver, who called her 'an oasis of truth in a world full of lies' — even though she had outed a famous rapper's wife as having cancer (she hadn't told some family members yet) or other celebrities as gay, or mocked their looks, weight, lack of intelligence.

'She sounds like she has a fifth-grade education,' she once said of Beyoncé. 

While he was alive, Williams falsely claimed that Tupac Shakur had been raped while serving time. 

She said that the young men claiming Michael Jackson molested them were lying for a 'money grab' and that a 14-year-old girl claiming that R. Kelly sexually assaulted her had given her 'consent'.

To be sure, Williams could be terrible. Despicable, even.

It all feels gross. As anyone who loves someone with dementia knows, their personal dignity is the first thing to go.

To have that stripped so very publicly - when it seems Williams doesn't have the cognition to assent - is particularly gruesome. 

But her awfulness always seemed generated from her own self-loathing: As a child, her parents were critical of her looks and weighed her every day. She suffered from hyperactivity. She clearly had multiple plastic surgeries and stayed married to a man who cheated on her flagrantly.

Her own celebrity was built on bile, on saying not just controversial but remarkably hateful things. That bitterness consumed her.

Of course Wendy Williams was only ever going to implode. Her utter lack of self-esteem, of any core identity that neither needed nor relied on fame, was never going to sustain her.

'I have no friends,' she says in the documentary. It's all too believable and sad.

Instead, she has a jeweler-cum-personal manager, who we see fishing a half-empty vodka bottle out of her bedroom while Williams demands he leave it alone.

'I love being famous,' she says. 'But family is everything.' It feels like something she'd like to believe rather than the truth. Her son Kevin Jr. sits for the cameras to deny claims that he stole money from his mother.

Her ex-husband tormented her. Her mother died in December 2020. She has, at various points, been estranged from her brother and father.

Now her sister Wanda and her niece are spilling to People about her addictions and medical issues — and it's all timed to this documentary, which stopped filming in April 2023 after the crew discovered Williams at home, eyes rolled back in her head.

It's enough to make your skin crawl.

Williams was on the cusp of her dementia diagnosis when she began filming this documentary, which means she was very likely suffering noticeable cognitive impairments well before that.

She also suffers from Graves' disease and lymphedema. The cumulative effects mean that she often looks and sounds mentally ill.

So not only is Williams, with some of her family's apparent endorsement, depicted as a sideshow freak here, but they're also trying to spin her crisis as Britney-adjacent: Williams's legal guardian will decide whether she can ever leave the facility that now houses her.

'Did you see a neurologist?' an off-camera producer asks Williams in the doc.

'To find out if I'm crazy?' Williams responds. 'Mmm-hmm.'

'I love being famous,' she says. 'But family is everything.' It feels like something she'd like to believe rather than the truth. Her son Kevin Jr. (pictured) sits for the cameras to deny claims that he stole money from his mother.

Her ex-husband tormented her. Her mother died in December 2020. She has, at various points, been estranged from her brother and father. (Pictured: Ex-husband Kevin Hunter).

Now her sister Wanda and her niece (pictured) are spilling to People about her addictions and medical issues - and it's all timed to this documentary. It's enough to make your skin crawl.

The kind of fame Williams built for herself was uniquely masochistic. How else to describe pulling the cameras up to capture her own downfall?

If only she had someone to protect her from herself. And who knows? Perhaps she did and pushed them all away.

But to have relatives crawl into her fading spotlight, to sell a story that has no happy ending, feels all too cruel.

'She sounds really good,' her niece Alex Finnie told 'The View' on Thursday — even though she wouldn't say when they had last spoken on the phone.

Finnie added that her aunt 'is excited about her future'.

What!? Anyone suffering with dementia has no future. That's the kind of painful truth that Williams herself would have been the first to point out.

At least she has this final moment in the sun. But for someone who is declining so terribly, who cannot participate in her own publicity tour, it feels like a violation — too far, perhaps, even for Wendy Williams.