Jada Pinkett Smith is opening up about it all. Early Wednesday morning, she revealed that her and husband, Will Smith have been separated since 2016. Additionally, she shared that Chris Rock once reached out to her to ask her on a date after he heard rumors that the two were getting divorced. Now, she is sharing that the slap at the 2022 Academy Awards between her husband and Rock was just as much of a surprise to her as it was to fans watching.
“I thought, ‘This is a skit,’ ” she shared with PEOPLE. “I was like, ‘There’s no way that Will hit him.’ It wasn’t until Will started to walk back to his chair that I even realized it wasn’t a skit.”
During the live broadcast of the 2022 Academy Awards, Rock made a joke about Pinkett Smith’s hair loss. This came only a short time after she revealed publicly that she has alopecia and suffers from hair loss because of the disease. Her husband defended her by yelling expletives to Rock from the audience and then following up with a slap across the face in front of the audience and viewers at home watching.
Pinkett Smith told the outlet that the first words she spoke to Will once they were alone were: “Are you okay?”
The Red Table Talk host has been doing press runs for her new memoir, Worthy. In the book, she recalls the slap and how the two of them were already separated at that time.
“But when I hear Will yell ‘wife’ in the chaos of the moment, an internal shift of Oh s— . . . I am his wife! happens instantly,” she writes in the book.
The new memoir hits bookshelves everywhere Oct. 17.