
Wendy Williams producer pinpoints the moment the troubled host's life derailed: 'It was eating her up alive'
Wendy Williams ' former talk show producer has claimed the host's life began to derail when she found out her now ex-husband had allegedly fathered a child with another woman.
News broke in August 2019 that Kevin Hunter, 52, had allegedly impregnated his mistress - despite being married to the beloved television presenter, 60.
Wendy had been married to Kevin for 21 years, with the couple eventually divorcing in 2020.
Yazmin Ramos, who served as a senior producer on the show, recalled how Wendy was never the same after she learned Kevin allegedly had got another woman pregnant, and her talk show was eventually canceled in 2022 due to her ongoing absences and health issues.
Speaking in the upcoming Investigation Discovery documentary Trapped: What is Happening to Wendy Williams, Yazmin claimed Kevin's infidelity began 'eating her up alive.'
She began: 'Wendy and Kevin were a power couple. They were able to accomplish a lot of big goals, and they made history. I got to watch their relationship when it was really good, and I also got to see their relationship when it wasn't good.
'Being at The Wendy Show as a producer and seeing her endure life situations that were very difficult for her to face was really hard.
'Despite some of the life situations that she was dealing with, that she may not have wanted to deal with, she was still able to come and show up for the show.
'I was able to see some days behind the scenes that Wendy was dealing with a lot.
'That was very difficult for Wendy because Wendy was in love with her partner and seeing her face that… it was hard for me to know what she was going through.'
Referring to the moment when news emerged about Kevin's alleged cheating, Yazmin said that Wendy struggled to cope.
She continued: 'Once the world found out that Kevin had another woman pregnant, the show from there was not the same because Wendy was not the same.
'I know that whenever someone is dealing with something that's very difficult, they usually go towards coping mechanisms and however way they can cope they cope.
'Not only did I love Wendy as being my boss, but I love Wendy as a person and I knew she was dealing with a lot of tough stuff at the time.
'During the middle of the season, things just were not as great for her.
'Wendy was able to disconnect and not pay attention as much to what might have been going on, but the minute that she could not hide it anymore, and everyone knew, and she couldn't say anything to justify it, I could tell that it was starting to eat her up alive.'
Wendy took a prolonged absence from her talk show at the end of 2018 and through the start of 2019, at the time claiming it was for medical reasons.
After serving Kevin with marriage dissolution documents in 2019, sources told DailyMail.com that Wendy gave her husband 48 hours to vacate his belongings from their New Jersey mansion.
Photos were also obtained at that time of Sharina Hudson's gold matte Ferrari Portofino, a gift from Kevin, being loaded onto the bed of a tow truck.
Kevin has not publicly acknowledged his alleged affairs nor has he commented on if he fathered a child outside of wedlock.
Wendy claimed she first found out the producer had allegedly been unfaithful while she was pregnant with their son Kevin Jr., now 24.
The upcoming ID documentary is set to delve into the #FreeWendy movement and the current push by Wendy's fans and loved ones to have her released from the guardianship she has been under since 2022.
The TV personality has been residing at an assisted living facility in the state of New York after being placed under the guardianship of Sabrina Morrissey three years ago.
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The Guardian
10 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘It's hard to find work': Marlee Matlin on making Hollywood history but waiting for change
In 1987, at the age of 21, Marlee Matlin became the youngest person ever to win a best actress Oscar. Footage of her victory appears early in Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, a new documentary on the trailblazing actor's life and career: Matlin, remarkably fresh-faced even for 21, in her very 80s purple dress, her brunette hair swept up by a floral headpiece, black-rimmed glasses on, appears stunned as William Hurt, her co-star in Children of a Lesser God and her boyfriend at the time, reads her name. Thunderous applause. The camera captures fellow nominee Jane Fonda mouthing 'that's so great' as Matlin, the first and still only deaf actor to win the award, approaches the podium and kisses Hurt. As she delivers her speech in American Sign Language (ASL), she seems almost too shocked to emote, overcome with the gravity of the moment. Matlin's win was indeed groundbreaking, a watershed moment for deaf representation. But as Not Alone Anymore explains, it was also much more complicated than a feelgood story of societal triumph, or a turning point for deaf creatives. Nor was it one of personal glory. Halfway through the film, the scene is replayed again, this time with the sound taken away – the thunderous applause muted to just a simulation of Matlin's own thunderous heartbeat as she walked to the stage. 'I was afraid as I walked up the stairs to get the Oscar,' Matlin recalls on screen in ASL. 'I was afraid because I knew, in my gut, that he wasn't that happy.' Hurt, 16 years her senior and an established Hollywood star, was intensely jealous of her success, and had already begun physically abusing her. Without sound and with context, what once read as overwhelming shock on her face instead appears as something darker, shaded with fear. The twist, of sorts, is one of many decisions by director Shoshannah Stern to subvert the hearing perspective that most viewers automatically assume. 'I wanted to return to her Oscar-winning moment twice,' Stern, a deaf actor herself, told me through an interpreter, 'because sound does limit people. There are a lot of things that I feel hearing people miss when they are just listening with their ears and not listening with their eyes.' When I first watched Matlin's win, I assumed, as Stern expected, that 'it's this roaring applause, so we're celebrating'. Without sound, the picture is clearer. 'You could see in that moment how scary it is,' said Stern. 'And it's right there. It's been in front of us this whole time.' Stern's intrinsic understanding of the deaf perspective was the reason Matlin, who went on to a long career on such shows as Seinfeld, The West Wing, The L Word and, most recently, the Oscar-winning film Coda, decided to make the film at all. 'Almost none of the documentaries that I've seen that have to do with a subject matter like myself have not been done right,' she told me over Zoom via her interpreter, Jack Jason, who has worked with Matlin since 1985. When PBS's American Masters approached her about a documentary, she had one demand: the director had to be deaf, and it had to be Stern, a longtime friend and occasional collaborator who co-created the show This Close. As she did with early financiers of Coda who wanted to cast big-name hearing actors for two deaf roles, Matlin stuck to her guns. Deaf participation, take it or leave it. 'I wanted to have that type of conversation I could [with] Shoshannah, where I could feel free and sign and not worry about an interpreter voiceover, not worry about my surroundings, not worry about any of that, just be there,' Matlin said. 'That was the first time that I felt at ease.' Much of Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, which first premiered at the Sundance film festival, features Stern and Matlin in conversation unlike in any prior documentary I've seen, even with deaf subjects. The two women sign without voiceover, just subtitles for hearing viewers. Any ASL interpreters were not only off camera, but in a different room, communicating via earpieces. 'I wasn't accustomed to that approach. I've never seen that,' said Matlin. 'I'm accustomed to being voiced over, because that's how it's been in my entire career. That's the hearing perspective.' As the first Oscar-winning deaf actor and still the most famous, Matlin knows how, as Stern puts it, 'the world often tries to force perspectives on people, put the weight of explaining an entire community's experience on one person'. Voiceover and interpreters 'are another forced perspective', she said. 'When I'm interviewed by hearing people, I have to look at the interpreter. Where are they? How is my language being translated into English? And then I'm limiting myself. I'm thinking in a way that the hearing interviewer or the hearing director is thinking. I'm not thinking as myself.' 'It wasn't what I wanted Marlee to say in our documentary, it was how she spoke, how that changes when our expectations and our perspectives change,' she added. 'Accessibility is for everyone. It's not just for us as deaf people, but a lot of times that responsibility, that weight, is put on one person.' Not Alone Anymore illustrates that weight, which Matlin felt acutely as a very young person experiencing rapid professional success. Cast in Children of a Lesser God fresh out of high school, Matlin was new not only to screen acting but the world beyond her small community in suburban Chicago. The youngest of three children in a hearing family – Matlin became deaf at 18 months, for unknown reasons that, she recalls, nevertheless left her parents guilt-stricken – she attended a mixed deaf/hearing school and began acting at age seven; she was inspired, in part, by Henry Winkler, a lifelong mentor she first met backstage at a school show at age 12. (In 1993, Matlin married Kevin Grandalski, a cop she met on the set of Reasonable Doubts, in the Winklers' back yard. They have four children.) Matlin's family was not fluent in ASL, and it took years for her to understand the loneliness and isolation at home. She coped by smoking marijuana. At 19, she began dating Hurt, who was then 35. Her drug use escalated with the physical and emotional abuse; she has said she smoked 20 joints a day, plus cocaine. In the midst of her awards season run, she entered rehab. She emerged sober, and also the face of a deaf community she did not totally understand. 'I didn't realize that there were more deaf people out there, outside of Chicago, a whole community. It was bigger than what I even realized,' she said. Not Alone Anymore powers through cringey clips of interviewers asking Matlin to explain deafness. How did it feel to be deaf? Had she come to terms with it? Matlin powered through as best she could. She quickly became an activist, successfully pushing legislation in the US requiring closed captioning on TV and streaming sites. But she struggled as the lone representative of deafness for hearing people. The film lingers on backlash from the deaf community when Matlin spoke at the 1988 Oscars, which many felt encouraged the stereotype that deaf intelligence was connected to one's ability to imitate hearing speech. Matlin says the incident, fanned by hearing media attention, drove her away from the deaf community for over a decade. 'I had no guidance in terms of someone to sit down to me and explain about the language that was being used, about the language that I used,' she said. 'I had to find out the hard way.' Matlin faced similar media blowback, though of a different tenor, when she disclosed Hurt's abuse, as well as incidents of molestation by a babysitter and teacher in her childhood, in her 2009 memoir, I'll Scream Later. Not Alone Anymore again assembles very pre-#MeToo clips in which interviewers discounted or dismissed her experience. In one clip, Joy Behar asks about 'spectacular' sex with Hurt. 'Marlee has always been ahead of the curve,' said Stern of Matlin's willingness to speak up years before it became more common to do so. When Hurt died in 2022, at the age of 71, Matlin found her name once again brought up in his wake. 'On social media, I had to look at both sides of the conversations,' she recalled. In posts and comments, some people accused her of lying about the abuse; others were mad at those who accused her of crying wolf. 'They were trying to define me,' she said. 'And I would have none of that. I wanted them to stop, but at the same time, I decided to step away from the conversation' during Coda's press run. Did she wish now that she said anything? 'No, I don't,' she answered, after a beat. 'Because nothing would satisfy these people. And why should I have to? I didn't trust what would happen if I did get involved, because of my past experience of being ignored, of being overlooked, not getting any help. But it was interesting to observe, to see the two factions fighting about me thinking that they knew me.' It's a typically strident answer from Matlin, who has never minced words, particularly on how her Oscar did not open up more opportunities for deaf actors – the film's title comes from her emotional reaction to Coda costar Troy Kotsur's supporting actor Oscar in 2022, becoming only the second deaf actor to win. As with Matlin's 1987 trophy, Kotsur's win hasn't changed much. 'I'm not seeing more opportunities open up,' said Stern. 'It's still up to deaf people or people from a minority group to explain their experience to the majority,' she added. 'We continue to say what is expected of us, which is: 'Great story. Representation has changed! There's going to be so many job opportunities!' That's what people are expecting us to say. And if we say that, nothing's going to change.' 'My least favorite question is: Are you working? What's next?' said Matlin. 'I hate answering that question. I say, 'Oh, well, I have this.' I try to change the subject, talk about something else because they won't understand what I'm going through. 'It's hard to find work,' she said, but still insists: 'This is something I love to do. This is a business that I love being in. I love acting. I love it all.' Naturally, she can't say what is next – 'waiting for a yes or no, an answer, that's typically what I do' – beyond press for a film she and Stern both hope challenges some perspectives. 'I hope it makes people think. I hope that people feel seen,' said Stern. 'I hope people know that they have value in how they see the world, and you don't just have to accept how things have been done for so long.' Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore is out now in US cinemas


The Guardian
29 minutes ago
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Daily Mail
34 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Cardi B blasts ex Offset in new song amid Stefon Diggs romance
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