Wendy Williams Says It’s ‘About Time’ for the Diddy Reckoning
Wendy Williams has weighed in on the accusations against Diddy. The former talk-show host has been openly critical of the disgraced mogul for over 20 years and told the Daily Mail that it’s “about time” that he be held accountable.
“What is really weird is that I have been told by so many people, ‘Wendy, you called it,’” Williams told the Daily Mail. She also remarked that she had seen the video of Diddy physically assaulting his former girlfriend Cassandra “Cassie” Ventura and found it especially appalling.
“You know how I feel about that? It is about time. To see this video on TV of [Ventura] getting pummeled … it was just horrific,” she said. “But now you have to think, How many more times? How many people? How many more women? It’s just so horrible.”
Williams and Diddy have had a tumultuous relationship since the late ’90s, when she was a shock jock at New York’s Hot 97 radio station and he was the young hotshot in charge of Bad Boy Entertainment. In a 2005 episode of her radio show, Williams said that the girl group Total, who were signed to Bad Boy Entertainment, tried to jump her outside of the Hot 97 offices. Years later, in a 2019 episode of The Wendy Williams Show, she told the story again, this time claiming an unnamed mogul had sent his artists to do the deed.
“Once upon a time, there was a music mogul who sent his all-girl group to beat my ass in front of the radio station. Fact!,” she claimed. “I get downstairs and find this girl group, jump out of a gypsy cab, to come after me. To kick my ass. I’m like, ‘For what?’ You know what I said was true. You all were broke and you were living in the projects, and that was that.”
When Williams was eventually fired from Hot 97 in 1998, many assumed that Diddy had something to do with it. Williams had shared a doctored image of him in a compromising position with another man to her website, which allegedly led him to call her bosses.
“[Diddy] told Hot 97 if they didn’t get rid of her before he got back in New York, that they was not going to get any music from any of his friends, any of the record label’s executives that was cool with him, everyone was going to boycott their station,” recalled Diddy’s former bodyguard, Gene Deal, in a 2022 episode of The Art of Dialogue. “We was out in L.A. for about three days. Before we landed back in New York, Wendy Williams was on the radio station in Philly. It was over for her. She was fired.”
Charlamagne tha God corroborated that story earlier this year on the Flagrant podcast. “Wendy’s whole thing was Diddy was gay,” the Breakfast Club host told the roundtable. “That’s why Wendy got fired from Hot 97. Wendy got fired from Hot 97 by Diddy ’cause that’s when Bad Boy was smoking hot. She got fired for putting that out there.”
In the years following her firing, Williams did not stop speaking about Diddy. During the Hot Topics segment of her namesake talk show, Williams discussed everything from his 50th-birthday party to his 2015 arrest for swinging a kettlebell at a UCLA football coach to his and Ventura’s brief split in 2015, of which she discussed the inherent power imbalance between them.
“My thing about when you date a mogul, it’s really difficult to avoid them because if you use your head you never know when they’ll pop up on the scene,” she told the audience. “He can hire a plane right now … land on the roof of the hotel she’s staying, pay people off at the front desk, ‘Give me a key and let me up in her room.’ I’m already paranoid as a person.”
In 2017, Diddy appeared on the show, and the two seemed to be on good terms.
“I know I pissed a lot of people off, including you. But this is a full-circle moment,” Williams told Diddy at the time.
But a year later, when Diddy and Ventura broke up for the final time, Williams did not hold her tongue. Diddy had been publicly reaching out to Ventura via Instagram, and Williams was quick to clock it for what it was. “I suggest don’t use social media, though, to reach out. I think this was a grand overture from Puffy. I don’t believe he really wants her back,” she told the audience. “I believe he probably treated her, at some point, like a possession. If you really cared, then you’d reach out privately not publicly.”
Earlier this year, a representative for Williams announced that she had been diagnosed with aphasia and dementia. Williams told the Daily Mail that she is “doing good” following her diagnosis.
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