Jada Pinkett Smith, the actress and talk show host, has disclosed that she has been separated from her husband Will Smith since 2016- six years before the notorious Oscar slap, in which Will Smith punched Chris Rock for making fun of Jada. The actress revealed this in an interview that aired on Wednesday. The marriage of the Hollywood power couple came under heavy scrutiny during last year’s Academy Awards when Smith hit comedian Chris Rock on stage for making a joke about his wife.
According to Pinkett Smith, Jada said that the couple had been living “totally separate lives” for years prior to the infamous incident.
“By the time we got to 2016 we were just exhausted with trying,” she said, in an advance clip from an interview to promote her new memoir, Worthy.
For many years, the couple rejected rumors of adultery and an open marriage.
However, in 2020, Pinkett Smith openly acknowledged an adulterous “entanglement” she experienced with musician August Alsina while separated from her husband.
That separation, according to Wednesday’s clip, has lasted till the current day, despite the fact that the couple is still legally married.
When asked why the couple chose to hide their sepration, Pinkett Smith replied they were “just not… ready yet” and “still trying to figure out between the two of us how to be in partnership.”
“We just got deep love for each other and we are going to figure out what that looks like for us,” Pinkett Smith told People magazine, in a separate interview.
‘We’re going to the Oscars as a family, not as husband and wife
In an excerpt from her memoir published Wednesday, Pinkett Smith also referenced the Oscars event in March 2022. When comedian Chris Rock came on stage, he made a joke about Pinkett Smith’s neatly cropped head. She suffers from alopecia.
Will Smith jumped onto the stage and slapped the comedian across the face before returning to his seat and screaming obscenities at the host.
According to the passage, Pinkett Smith initially mistook the slap for a “skit,” and even after realizing it wasn’t, she was “unclear on the reason why Will is so upset.”
“We had been living separate lives and were there as family, not as husband and wife,” she writes.
Chris Rock had proposed to Jada Pinkett Smith
Rock once asked her out when he thought she and Smith had split up, according to Pinkett Smith. “I think every summer all the reports would come out that me and Will were getting a divorce, and this particular summer, Chris, he thought that we were getting a divorce,” she told the publication.
“So he called me and basically he was like, ‘I’d love to take you out,'” she said, adding that she had to clearly state that there was no divorce in the offing.
“He was appalled. And he profusely apologized and that was that,” she said.
Smith and Pinkett-Smith Smith met in 1994 on the set of his show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Smith was married to his first wife at the time, whom he eventually divorced. Jaden and Willow are the couple’s two children.
