A newly-revised complaint in Wendy Williams’ lawsuit against Lifetime parent company A+E Networks over the release of a documentary chronicling her deteriorating mental and physical state looks for all profits from the project to fund her medical care.
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The amended complaint, filed on Sept. 16 in New York County Supreme Court, says that Williams received roughly $82,000 for her participation in the project, which documented her life for the better part of a year and showed her downward spiral as she struggled with family, fame and excessive alcohol consumption. It adds Lifetime Entertainment Services, Creature Films, and producer Mark Ford, as defendants to the case, alongside A&E and EOne Productions.
“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 states.
In March, Sabrina Morrissey, acting in her capacity as Williams’ temporary guardian, brought a lawsuit against A+E Networks. It claimed that the contract the company brokered to shoot the documentary wasn’t valid since Williams didn’t have the legal or mental capacity to authorize her participation in the title at the time. She was allegedly told that the film would be “positive and beneficial” to her image.
The complaint was part of a legal battle initiated by Morrissey that sought to block the documentary’s release. A temporary restraining order was granted before the ruling was reversed by a higher court. Since then, Roberta Kaplan, who represented E. Jean Carroll in a defamation case against former president Donald Trump, joined Williams’ legal team, which includes Ellen Holloman.
In a statement on the amended complaint, Kaplan said the defendants “viciously and shamelessly exploited Wendy Williams for their own profit while she was obviously incapacitated and suffering from dementia.”
The new filing claims Will Selby, Williams’ former manager, arranged for the ex-talk show host’s participation in the documentary. In response to concerns, he allegedly told Morrissey that the title would focus on Williams’ triumphant return to media and that he’d have full creative control. When asked what that meant, he said, “If I do not want it in the film, they will take it out.”
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Similar representations were made to EOne’s lawyers, according to the complaint. The company, alongside Ford, Creature Films and A&E, then drafted an allegedly one-sided on-camera talent agreement, Morrissey claims. “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.”
During this time, Williams began to receive around the clock care. Morrissey declined to allow the documentary team access to film additional footage. She assumed the project was dead given no contract was ever finalized.
But in February, A&E released a promotional trailer for the project. The complaint takes issue with filmmakers portraying Williams as a “laughingstock and drunkard, implicitly responsible for her own continued suffering” by including unflattering footage, such as photographs of her without her wig and nearly bald.
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.
The controversial 4 1/2-hour documentary, which contains footage from roughly seven months of Williams’ tumultuous past few years until she entered a health facility to treat cognitive issues last year, aired in February to blockbuster ratings , averaging slightly over a million viewers across the two nights it was broadcasted. Lifetime said it was the biggest nonfiction debut in two years. Williams, her son, Kevin Hunter Jr., and Selby, her jeweler-turned-manager, are all credited as executive producers.
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