Jada Pinkett Smith and her husband Will Smith saved their marriage after the infamous public scandal.
‘I nearly didn’t even attend the Oscars that year, but I’m glad I did,’ says Pinkett Smith via Daily Mail. ‘I call it the “holy slap” now because so many positive things came after it.’
It is needless to mention that she is referring to the 2022 Oscars, at which her husband was nominated in the Best Actor category. Jada said she isn’t dumping Will, despite rumors he has a new girlfriend.
It has been noted that the couple were seated in the front row when comedian and host Chris Rock made a joke about Pinkett Smith’s shaven head (a result of alopecia). Although at first Smith seemed to laugh, his wife gave an unamused eye-roll. Smith ascended the stage and slapped Rock’s face in front of a global TV audience.
‘Keep my wife’s name out of your f****** mouth!’ Smith raged in the deathly silent auditorium. Pinkett Smith reeled. But this was the moment that remade their marriage.
That moment of the s*** hitting the fan is when you see where you really are,’ she says. ‘After all those years trying to figure out if I would leave Will’s side, it took that slap for me to see I will never leave him. Who knows where our relationship would be if that hadn’t happened?’
Their near 30-year union was in crisis and though in Smith’s Oscars outburst he referred to Pinkett Smith, 52, as his ‘wife’, it later transpired they had split up six years previously and, as far back as July 2020, the couple had revealed all in a podcast she co-hosted, Red Table Talk.
In it, Pinkett Smith, with her clearly emotional husband next to her, described their separation and her subsequent ‘entanglement’ with a troubled young singer/songwriter, 19 years her junior, called August Alsina. She says she was trying to help him.
‘This is how a friendship unfolded that, much later and very unexpectedly, turned romantic,’ she writes in her new memoir, Worthy. In the book, Pinkett Smith is so frustrated by the bad press she received, not to mention the sympathy for her ex, that she dreamed of being a werewolf, tearing her husband to shreds and eating him.
