ESPN host Stephen A. Smith recently blamed Will Smith’s wife Jada Pinkett Smith for the surfacing of claims that her husband Will Smith was once caught having sex with fellow actor Duane Martin—allegations the couple has denied via News Week.
During a recent appearance on the YouTube show Unwine With Tasha K, a man called Brother Bilaal, who is described as a former friend and assistant to Will Smith, claimed that years ago he walked in on the Men in Black star, 55, having s*x with Martin, 58, in a dressing room on a movie set.
Following the debut of the trailer, a spokesperson for Will Smith told People of the claims: “This story is completely fabricated and the claim is unequivocally false.”
Pinkett Smith also spoke out against the claims in an interview with Power 105.1’s The Breakfast Club, which was teased on Wednesday and is set to debut in full on Thursday morning.
Appearing on the show to promote her recently released memoir Worthy, the Girls Trip star told her interviewers, including Charlamagne tha God and DJ Envy:
“Let me just say this. It’s ridiculous, right? And it’s nonsense.”
The Red Table Talk host went on to describe Bilaal as “a person that tried a shakedown, a money shakedown that didn’t work.”
“We’re gonna take legal action,” she said. “Because it’s one thing to have your opinion about somebody, versus just making up salacious, malicious stories. So, that’s actionable. So we [gonna] roll with that.”
While the Smiths have spoken out to deny the rumors, Martin—who first worked with Will Smith on his classic sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air—has opted not to issue a statement. TMZ has reported that Martin, who was previously married to My Wife and Kids star Tisha Campbell, finds the claim too “ridiculous” to address.
Hours after the claims were made public, Stephen A. Smith said on his own YouTube show that while he doesn’t believe the rumors to be true, he places the blame for the chatter squarely on Pinkett Smith’s shoulders.
“It’s all your fault, Jada!” Stephen A. Smith boomed into the camera. “You see what happens when you tell people [your] business? Because you see what happens is, is that me and everybody else in between can go out there and we can talk about a whole bunch of things. Why? Because you invited us to talk about it.”
“Whether it’s leaking out information about your sex life with your husband, whether it’s selling a book and telling the world that y’all been separated for seven years,” he added, in reference to Pinkett Smith’s revelation while promoting Worthy that she and her husband had quietly separated seven years ago.
