Wendy Williams has dominated radio and television for over three decades. This is thanks in large part to her sharp wit, infectious humor, and willingness to ask the crazy questions. If you let Kevin Hunter tell it, this also has a lot to do with his guidance and ideas. Hunter served as Williams’s confidant, protector, and executive producer throughout their tumultuous marriage. The now-separated couple are struggling to maintain the legacy of their canceled daytime talk show, and Kevin is looking to remind people of all his contributions as he forges a new path outside of Wendy’s shadow.
Wendy and Kevin Hunter met during her radio days and wed in 1997. In her biopic on Lifetime, she described how Kevin was a bad boy that made people very scared to approach Wendy, something she found appealing because she was so loathed by the celebrities she covered. She famously recalls how he came to her rescue when the ladies of Total pulled up to the radio station to beat her up.
They would welcome their only child together, Kevin Jr., in 2000. Kevin Sr. would soon become Wendy’s manager and agent and eventually serve as executive producer on The Wendy Williams Show. He became a dominating presence on the show, and rumors began circulating that he was a nightmare behind the scenes. Despite all of this, he seems to feel he was the glue that kept Wendy together. In the time since he’s been let go from the show, Williams seems to have lost control of her health and spiraled into a crisis that cost her the series. This probably has more to do with their messy divorce and him fathering a child with his mistress than him leaving the show, but he feels it’s the other way around and that he should not have been let go by the producers.
Kevin argued in a recent IG live that he feels without him in her corner, Wendy has no one but their son and worries that all remaining staff is only looking to profit off her and does not care about her well-being. He says Wendy is worth more dead than alive and that Kevin Jr. has to threaten to call the police to get his mother help when her handlers refused to let him upstairs when she first fell ill. Kevin is taking his gripes to court, suing the show for wrongfully firing him and arguing that he was instrumental in the programs success and created segments like Hot Topics and Shoe Cam.
Hot Topics is the main piece of the Wendy Show arsenal that helped make it a massive success. In it, Wendy sits on her big purple chair and goes through the current topics in the press, giving her opinions on them all. This is often when Wendy would turn on the charm and give really colorful critiques on our favorite celebrities and gossip. It became so popular that several days out of the month, she would do the segment for the full hour of the show. Shoe Cam is also a Wendy staple where she has her guests show off their fancy kicks and heels for a camera on the floor.
If truly responsible for the segments, then the show does owe a lot to Hunter a lot. So does Wendy, who has never been shy about singing Kevin’s praises no matter how bad the relationship got. She credits him for keeping her safe and sane during a lot of the craziness and being a pillar for her in 2017 when she got her Graves Disease diagnosis and had to take six weeks off of her show.
Unfortunately, their romantic relationship seemed to always overshadow their working partnership, and it is rumored that Wendy served Kevin with divorce papers right on the set of their talk show on April 11th, 2019. Hunter is not completely oblivious to the harm he’s caused Williams and took full accountability for the mess he left her in after moving on and starting a new life with his mistress. In the live, he says he truly respects Wendy and her family and loves them despite the narrative that has been spun about him. He is proud of all they accomplished together, and although he apologies he does not regret fathering another child during their marriage. “I do not regret what happened. I was not trapped, as a matter of fact, the mother of my child […] was the first one to try to suggest an alternative and I actually said no. Kevin claims he said no, because it was the joy he needed in his life at the moment. As the video continued, Kevin called out the individuals trying to judge him without being in his shoes.
