Pinkett Smith also details the hate she received for rolling her eyes at Rock’s joke – a reaction that some say led Smith to storm the stage – to illustrate how women are damned if they do , and damned if they don’t. “It was easy to tell the story of how the perfect Hollywood megastar fell to his death because of his imperfect wife,” she writes. “Blaming the woman is nothing new.”
“How is it that a woman can be so irrelevant and guilty at the same time?” she asks. “It made me think about the narrative out there about me as the adulterous wife who had now driven her husband crazy with one look. I had to take responsibility for contributing to the existence of this false narrative. I also had to smile at the thought that the world would think I had so much control over Will Smith. If I had had that much control over Will, Chile, my life would have been completely different for those nearly three damn decades. Real talk!”
By adulterous, Pinkett Smith means her relationship with August Alsina, which she described on a 2020 episode of “Red Table Talk” as an “entanglement” in which she and Smith – after the information became public and became a public spectacle were – had already argued with each other over a years-old chapter of their lives. The conversation ended with laughter and a fist bump to her slogan: “We ride together, we die together, bad marriage for life.”
The truth is that the Smiths were not together in the traditional sense at the time she was with Alsina, nor are they now. But they are neither in an open marriage nor are they unmarried, polyamorous or divorced. They are something else entirely: life partners in family and business who have long maintained an agreement they call “a relationship of transparency.” In recent years they have lived separately. As a 50th birthday present, she bought her own apartment and moved out of her property in Calabasas.
In a way, her new home, also in Calabasas, brings full circle a dream that began before they met, when she was renovating an “old-fashioned, little” farmhouse on the outskirts of Baltimore that stood on property she owned envisions filling it with rescue dogs and cats, as well as a horse for her mother. During this time, she had received a call from Will Smith, who had recently separated from his first wife. “Do you see anyone?” he had asked her. “Um, no,” she replied. “Good,” he said. “You see me now.”