Wendy Williams Seen Out to Dinner with Niece Alex Finnie 2 Days After Being Taken to the Hospital by NYPD

Wendy Williams was spotted in public after her hospital visit earlier this week.

On Wednesday, March 12, the former talk show host, 60, was seen in New York City with her niece Alex Finnie as she returned to the assisted living facility she’s been in for the last several months amid her ongoing conservatorship battle.

Williams and Finnie had dinner at Tucci in NoHo which marked a rare outing for the TV personality, who has been vocal about how “suffocating” and “lonely” her life of late.

The outing came two days after Williams was removed from Coterie, the assisted living facility in Hudson Yards, by the New York Police Department and taken to a local hospital “for evaluation” in an ambulance.

The NYPD were responding to a welfare check on Williams, a spokesperson told PEOPLE, after she had allegedly dropped a note out of her window that read “Help,” per The New York Post.

The next day, Williams called into Good Day New York from the hospital and claimed she received mental competency tests and “passed with flying colors” despite her 2023 dementia diagnosis and repeated claims from her court-appointed guardian that she is “cognitively impaired.”

Her caretaker Ginalia Monterrosa was with her at the hospital and told the news outlet Williams had undergone tests and it had “been deemed she is not incapacitated.”

“I think it’s great news, and it’s public, and everybody knows factually that Wendy’s not incapacitated,” Monterrosa said.

Following the tests, Williams said her “number one most important thing” was “getting out of guardianship,” which was put in place in 2022 and left her own family out of the loop on her life and her health.

It was not the first time the former Wendy Williams Show host claimed she is not mentally incapacitated, despite her guardian’s reports that she is. In February, Williams insisted she was “not incapacitated” and does not “have frontotemporal dementia,” which her medical team said she had been diagnosed with in February 2024.

She’s been speaking out more frequently in recent months about the state of her treatment, including an interview on The Breakfast Club in January where she said she feels like she’s “in prison.”

“Listen, this system is broken, this system that I am in. This system has falsified a lot,” she said on the podcast. “For the last three years, I have been caught up in the system.”

Her niece Finnie joined her on the episode and also weighed in as she asked for her aunt to be treated “with dignity and give[n] the freedoms she deserves” while acknowledging that the “legal situation” prevents them from addressing certain things.

“But I think the thing we can talk about is that my aunt sounds great. I’ve seen her in a very limited capacity. I’ve seen her, we’re talking to her. This does not match an incapacitated person. That’s why we say she’s in a luxury prison. Because she’s being held and she’s being punished for whatever reason that other people are coming up with as to why it is she has to be kept in this position.”