Will Smith and Jada Pinkett separated for the last seven years
Jada Pinkett Smith reveals that she and her husband Will Smith have been separated for seven years.
Speaking about the Oscar slap to the People Magazine, Jada says she thought it was a skit.
In 2022 at the Academic Awards, Will gave Chris Rock a slap on the Oscar stage for joking about Jada’s shaved head (she lives with alopecia).
“I thought, ‘This is a skit,’” Jada said. “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.”
The Academy banned Smith from its membership and from attending events such as the Oscars for 10 years.
The two got married in 1997 and they are blessed with two kids, however, they are currently figuring out their marriage while being separated.
“We’re still figuring it out,” Jada told People about the state of her marriage to Will, revealing they had been quietly separated for six years before the 2022 Oscars where the slap took place. “We’ve been doing some really heavy-duty work together. We just got deep love for each other and we are going to figure out what that looks like for us.”
She further explained why they separated and how they’ve been coping.
“I think by the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying. I think we were both kind of just still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.”
“I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce,” she added. “We will work through whatever. And I just haven’t been able to break that promise…We live separately.”
