Wendy Williams
Wendy Williams Hunter is an American former broadcaster, media personality and author. Williams began her career as a radio DJ and quickly became known as a shock jock in New York City. She gained notoriety for her confrontational interviews of celebrities. The VH1 reality series The Wendy Williams Experience broadcast events surrounding her radio show in 2006. From 2008 to 2021, she hosted the nationally syndicated television talk show The Wendy Williams Show.
Williams was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2009. On her 50th birthday, the council of Asbury Park, New Jersey, renamed the street on which she grew up to Wendy Williams Way. Her other endeavors include authoring several books, appearances in various films and television shows and touring her stand-up comedy show. She has also created a fashion line, a wig line and a jewelry collection.
Due to health complications, Williams retired in 2021. She was placed under a guardianship one year later and was diagnosed with aphasia and frontotemporal dementia in 2023. A neurologist challenged Williams’ dementia diagnosis in 2025 after the findings of a court-ordered medical evaluation were released.
Early life
Wendy Joan Williams was born on July 18, 1964, in Asbury Park, New Jersey. She is the second of three children born to Shirley and Thomas Dwayne Williams. The couple had a combined three master's degrees; Shirley was a special education teacher while Thomas was a teacher and school principal who in 1969 became the first black school administrator in Red Bank, New Jersey. Following race riots in Asbury Park in 1970, the family moved to the predominantly white, middle income suburb of Wayside in Ocean Township, New Jersey. They attended a Baptist church and visited the town of Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, each summer. As a child, doctors recommended Williams be medicated to control her hyperactivity. She suffered from poor body image due to the diet her parents put her on after gaining weight in elementary school. Williams was a Brownie in the Girl Scouts and volunteered as a candy striper. Her parents believed she would become a nurse.File:Wendy Williams 1980.png|thumb|upright=0.8|left|Williams as a sophomore in Ocean Township High School's 1980 yearbook
Williams acted as an announcer at her younger brother's Little League Baseball games. She graduated from Ocean Township High School in 1982 among four black students, ranking 360th in the class of 363. Her academic performance contrasted with that of her older sister, who received a university scholarship at the age of 16. As she was able to use "white" diction instead of African-American Vernacular English, Williams's white classmates considered her one of their own and freely used the word nigger around her. She did not get along with the other black students and said their only commonality was smoking cannabis. According to Williams, she did not listen to hip hop music and instead listened to rock bands like AC/DC because they were popular with her classmates. Due to her suburban upbringing, Williams considers herself "a multicultural woman who happens to be Black".
Williams attended Northeastern University in Boston with the intent of becoming a television anchor. Less than a month after starting, she switched from television communications to radio because she could advance her career faster—a move which her parents disapproved. Williams graduated in 1986 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in communication and, to appease her parents, a minor in journalism. She was a disc jockey for the college radio station, WRBB, where rapper LL Cool J was her first celebrity interviewee. As an intern for Matt Siegel at contemporary hit radio station WXKS-FM, Williams recapped the soap operas Dallas and Dynasty on air. In 2021, Williams revealed that she was date raped while in college.
Media career
1986–1994: Career beginnings, WQHT, and WRKS
Two weeks after graduating from Northeastern, Williams began her career as a disc jockey working for the small, calypso and reggae-oriented WVIS in Frederiksted, U.S. Virgin Islands, but disliked the role because she did not learn as much about radio from her colleagues as she expected. Due to low pay and isolation from her family, Williams began sending resumes and demo tapes of herself to other radio stations. She left WVIS after eight months and obtained a position at Washington, D.C.'s WOL, but found its oldies radio format incompatible with her personality. Williams continued sending tapes to other stations and on November 1, 1987, began as a weekend fill-in on New York City's WQHT. After the urban contemporary station hired her full-time to work overnight shifts, she left WOL.Williams was fired from WQHT after two years and briefly worked overnight shifts at WPLJ before being hired by WRKS. Initially working as a fill-in, WRKS gave Williams a non-compete clause and permanent morning position in May 1990 after WBLS began poaching its employees. She joined Jeff Foxx and Spider Webb as part of the station's "Wake-Up Club". There, Williams began gossiping about rappers and celebrities during a segment called "Dish the Dirt". Those she talked about, such as Bill Cosby and Russell Simmons, called the station and demanded she be fired. As she grew into a popular radio personality, WRKS moved Williams to host the evening drive time slot in April 1991. By 1993, she was the highest-rated host in her time slot in the New York City market and received a Billboard Radio Award for R&B Major Market Radio Air Personality of the Year.
Williams co-hosted American Urban Radio Networks' syndicated Top 30 USA song countdown program in 1993 and USA Music Magazine in 1994. By mid-1994, WRKS had suffered a ratings decline amid competition from hip hop-oriented WQHT, which was owned by Emmis Broadcasting. In an effort to reverse the trend, WRKS moved Williams back to mornings on September 26, 1994, where she hosted a program titled "Wendy and Company". However, Emmis purchased WRKS less than three months later and transferred Williams to WQHT, where she began hosting the evening drive time slot on December 12, 1994. As WRKS was reformatted into an urban adult contemporary outlet geared toward older audiences, they believed Williams would better reflect WQHT's younger demographic.
1994–2001: WQHT, website, move to WUSL
By this time, Williams attended parties to gain information which she would report on air in addition to reading tabloid newspapers. She continued gossip segments and gave relationship advice to teenage girls during "Ask Wendy". Williams's ratings increased dramatically after she read aloud a magazine article about an anonymous rapper confessing to being gay. She became known for speculating about his identity and spread rumors that there was not one, but multiple gay rappers who were not open about their sexuality. Among her insinuations was that Tupac Shakur was raped in prison, which he denied. Williams employed the term "pinky's up" when alleging someone was gay and regularly used the slur faggot, which she considered to be inoffensive. Her comments contributed to an increase of homophobia in hip hop culture.Williams created a website, www.gowendy.com, as an offshoot of her radio program. Featuring photos and rumors of celebrities, it received up to 100,000 views per day. In April 1997, WQHT suspended Williams for one week after mentioning her website on air, which displayed a doctored image of Bad Boy Records executive Sean Combs naked from the waist down having sex with another man. The station suspended Williams again in September 1997 for online comments insinuating that her colleague Angie Martinez's boyfriend Q-Tip was gay. Upon her return after deleting the post a month later, Williams called the Bad Boy Records girl group Total "broke hoes" after their comments favoring her suspension. WQHT permanently removed Williams, and her fans protested outside of their offices. By this time, Williams had received more than 50 letters from the station regarding her "lack of good judgment". She speculated her removal was due to pressure from music industry executives and stood by her comments, stating: "I stopped caring about artists when I realized it's more lucrative to talk about them than with them."
She was fired from Hot 97 in 1998. Williams was hired by a Philadelphia urban station, WUSL. She was very open about her personal life on air, discussing her miscarriages, breast enhancement surgery, and former drug addiction. She helped the station move from 14th place in the ratings to 2nd.
2001–2008: WBLS
In 2001, Williams returned to the New York airwaves when WBLS hired her full-time for a syndicated 2–6 p.m. time slot. Williams' friend, MC Spice of Boston, offered his voiceover services to the show, often adding short rap verses tailored specifically for Williams' show. The New York Times stated that her "show works best when its elements – confessional paired with snarkiness – are conflated". By 2008, she was syndicated in Redondo Beach, California; Shreveport, Louisiana; Wilmington, Delaware; Toledo, Ohio; Columbia, South Carolina; Emporia, Virginia; Lake Charles, Louisiana; Tyler, Texas; and Alexandria, Louisiana, among other markets. Williams left her radio show in 2009 to focus on her television program and spend more time with her family.Media outlets have described Williams's 2003 interview with Whitney Houston as her most infamous. After Williams asked Houston about her marriage and breast implants, they began a shouting match and Houston said she would have fought Williams if she were younger. In a later interview with Williams, Houston's confidant Robyn Crawford said they planned to confront Williams years earlier after she talked about Houston and her relationship with Crawford on air. Wu-Tang Clan performer Method Man had a personal and publicized conflict with Williams in 2006 after she revealed details about his wife's cancer diagnosis.