Daytime talk show host Wendy Williams announced on her show Tuesday that she was in rehab and staying in a sober-living facility.
“You know me for being a very open and truthful person, and I’ve got more to the story for you,” Williams said to the camera, her voice breaking, while standing in the audience.
“For some time now, and even today and beyond, I have been living in a sober house,” Williams said, holding back tears.
She went on to explain her new daily routine, which she said included being driven around the tri-state area by her “24-hour sober coach,” doing two hours of Pilates after she tapes her show and going to meetings.
Williams also visits her “brothers and sisters caught up in their addiction and looking for help,” she said. After that, she is driven back to the sober-living home where she lives with “a bunch of smelly boys who’ve become my family,” she said. Then it’s lights out by 10pm.
Williams also discussed her history of drug addiction.
“I had a struggle with cocaine in my past, and I never went to a place to get the treatment,” she said. “I don’t know how except God was sitting on my shoulder and I just stopped,” she added.
In January, Williams announced that she was going on a three-week hiatus from her show to focus on her health after she was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, an immune system disorder that results in an overactive thyroid.
After actors Nick Cannon and Jerry O’Connell stepped in as guest hosts, she returned to the show in early March.
Williams, who spent 20 years as a radio show host before she began hosting ‘The Wendy Williams Show’ in 2008, said that no one but her husband and her son was aware that she was living in a sober-living facility.
“No one knew because I look so glamorous on here,” Williams said.
Williams, who memorably had a hostile interview with Whitney Houston in 2003 after she asked Houston about her drug use on the radio, broke down on her show in 2012 shortly after Houston died because, she said, she connected with Houston’s “demons of substance abuse.”
“It’s been almost 15 years since I smoked last from a crack pipe,” Williams said at the time. Williams, 54, said she was now putting her sobriety first.
“This is my autobiographical story and I am living it,” Williams said, adding, “Either you’re calling me crazy or the bravest woman you know — I don’t care.”
