Jada Pinkett Smith dropped a pop culture bombshell this morning when she revealed that she and Will Smith have been separated throughout all their various and sundry public scandals over the past few years. That includes Jada’s “entanglement” with rapper August Alsina, as discussed on Red Table Talk, as well as the infamous Oscars slap when Will told Chris Rock he’d better “keep my wife’s name out your fucking mouth.” Long have we wondered what was going through Jada’s mind in that moment, and now we know the answer, which is apparently literally, “Oh shit, I am his wife!”
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This is from an excerpt of Jada’s new memoir, Worthy, published by People on Wednesday. In the book, Jada writes that she had some trepidation about seeing Chris Rock at the Academy Awards knowing he had taken shots at her in the past. “I’m sure he’ll play nice,” she thought to herself, “But another thought was, He’s not going to be able to help himself.” When that premonition proved true, she claims she was less offended on her own behalf and more so that “the Oscars, in all its political correctness, was telling the world it was okay to make jokes at the expense of a woman suffering from alopecia.”
We know what happens next: Jada’s husband—or ex-husband, or whatever you want to call it—got up from his seat and assaulted Rock on stage. “It’s not until Will yells from his seat back up at Chris to ‘keep my wife’s name out your fuckin’ mouth,’ and then repeats it, that I perceive the gravity of the situation, and that, no, it had not been a skit,” Jada writes. “Even so, I am 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. But when I hear Will yell ‘wife’ in the chaos of the moment, an internal shift of Oh shit . . . I am his wife! happens instantly.”
There you have it: despite sitting front row at the Oscars next to Will, knowing full well that the world believed them to be a married (and together) couple, Jada apparently forgot they were married and didn’t even realize what all the fuss was about at first. When she was able to process the moment, she writes that “no matter what, Will and I are in this together.”
To add an extra layer of intrigue to the situation, Jada tells People that Rock actually asked her out one summer because he thought she was getting a divorce. Rock was apparently “appalled” and “profusely apologized” when he realized he was wrong. Fast forward to the Oscars 2022, and “Chris came down to the end of the stage and tried to apologize to me. He said, ‘I didn’t mean you any harm.’ I said, ‘I can’t talk about this now, Chris. This is some old shit.’ I thought this was [about] the Oscar 2016 and … their stuff that they had before I even came into the picture in the late ‘80s. I’ve got to leave that to Will and Chris to talk about, but they got their stuff for sure.” Nevertheless, The Slap drama persisted…