Real story Oscars slap?
Sheree Zampino, at the time and had a son together, Trey, but he instantly fell for Jada.
He quickly divorced Zampino and, according to Pinkett Smith in Worthy, told his next wife in his typically bumptious way: ‘You’re going out with me now.’
She admits in the book that she found married life – even with their wealth and fame – immensely challenging. ‘While I was really living the dream, I hit a huge wall – a massive amount of depression.’
As she turned 40, she heard ‘voices’ telling her to kill herself, adding: ‘I started looking for places, cliffs where I could have an accident, because I didn’t want my kids to think that their mother had committed suicide.’
She says she tried many New Age treatments for her depression, including ‘Goddess gatherings’ (where a ‘sacred circle’ of women honour the ‘Divine Feminine’), silent yoga retreats, and consultations with an elder of the highly controversial Santeria religion, which was brought to Cuba by African slaves and can involve animal sacrifice.
She stopped having suicidal thoughts, she says, when she started taking the dangerous South American psychedelic drug ayahuasca, which Smith and their adult children have also tried.
Turning to that fateful Oscars night, she admits she rolled her eyes when Rock poked fun at her bald head, but insists she wasn’t upset for herself but for other alopecia sufferers.
She 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.’
Rebutting long-standing claims that she was responsible for her husband’s outburst, she insists that until Smith started walking back to his seat afterwards, she was convinced the whole episode had been a ‘skit’ and the slap wasn’t real.
Pinkett Smith does not disclose whether Smith knew at the time that Rock – with whom she provided the voices for the 2005 animated film Madagascar and its two sequels – had once phoned her and said: ‘I’d love to take you out.’ He said he’d heard they were getting divorced. When she insisted they weren’t, ‘he was appalled, and he profusely apologised and that was that’.
Those rumours of marital issues have indeed been circulating for years. ‘I’ve heard all the things – their marriage is not real, he’s gay, she’s gay, they swing,’ she said in 2009. ‘I tell you what, it’s too hard to be in a pretend marriage.’
Or perhaps not that hard. The duo spent years not only batting off such speculation but doing their best to portray themselves as one of Tinseltown’s rare devoted married couples.
‘Happy Anniversary, My Queen! I am forever Devoted to Nurturing your Deepest Truth,’ Smith simpered on Instagram in 2017, as he celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary.
Asked later that year on a chat show how she kept things ‘hot’ with her husband, Pinkett Smith said: ‘I really think that Will and I just have amazing chemistry on a lot of different levels.’
In 2021, they were still gushing publicly about their love for each other, Smith telling ABC News they were ‘pursuing the kind of love that everybody dreams about’. And only last month she wished him Happy Birthday on Instagram, cherishing ‘this Divine assignment we’ve chosen to walk together’.
There have been wobbles, they have admitted on occasions, when they’ve both been unhappy in the marriage, but they have always been at pains to stress the problems were either passing or not that important.
The biggest wobble was revealed in 2020 when August Alsina, a singer 21 years younger than Pinkett Smith, said they’d had a long-time affair.
Alsina, who had been introduced to her by her son, Jaden, at a music festival in London in 2015, claimed Will Smith had actually given his blessing to their relationship.
Friends said Alsina – so smitten with Pinkett Smith that he called her ‘God’s divinity’, became so close to the Smiths that he went on holiday with them and stayed at their $42m mansion in Calabasas, Los Angeles.
Pinkett Smith initially denied the claims, only to confess a month later in a discussion with Smith on a chat show she hosts on Facebook.
She claimed her ‘entanglement’ with Alsina started while she and Smith were separated and ‘going through a very difficult time’. However, the couple ended the discussion by chorusing: ‘Twenty-five years and counting. We ride together, we die together.’ In 2021, Smith gave an interview to GQ magazine to promote his memoir, in which he wrote that as long ago as 2011 they realised ‘their marriage wasn’t working… and clearly something had to change’. Although it wasn’t included in the book, he confided that the change in question was that they stopped being monogamous, Smith adding: ‘Jada never believed in conventional marriage.’
But nor, it appears, does he. Smith has admitted he used to
She was convinced it had been a skit and the slap wasn’t real
As long ago as 2011 they realised their marriage wasn’t working
have a fantasy about possessing a 20-strong ‘harem of girlfriends’, including actress Halle Berry and ballerina Misty Copeland.
While Pinkett Smith told People they’ve never had an open marriage, she hinted years ago that she’d given Smith the goahead to find other sexual partners, saying: ‘I’ve always told Will, “You can do whatever you want as long as you can look at yourself in the mirror and be okay.” ’
In 2011, it was claimed Jada and singer Marc Anthony, then married to Jennifer Lopez, were ‘inappropriately close’ and were caught together at the family home. They denied the claims.
The couple have also raised unconventional children – rapper and actor Jaden, and singer and actress Willow, 22. ‘We don’t do punishment,’ Smith once boasted of their parenting techniques, and some would say it rather shows.
Home-schooled and propelled towards stardom from an early age, their offspring are insufferably pretentious and conceited – perhaps even more so than their parents.
Some say that much of the gobbledygook spouted by the family comes from their exposure to Scientology.
Will and Jada were introduced to the controversial ‘church’ by Tom Cruise, a close friend, in 2004. Although they have insisted they are not Scientologists but ‘students of world religion’, they have donated generously to the organisation.
In 2008 the Smiths spent almost $1m on setting up the New Village Leadership Academy in Los Angeles which their children attended. They claimed to have designed the curriculum but faced allegations that it was focused on Scientology.
In the weird world of Will and Jada, the news that they actually split up seven years ago is simply par for the course.