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Will Smith has responded to his wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s statements about their tumultuous relationship in her memoir, Worthy, due out October 17.
In an email to The New York Times, Smith expressed that Pinkett Smith’s revelations about her marriage in her memoir “woke him up.” He realized that “she had led a life full of danger” and that “she is more resilient, wiser and more compassionate” than he had thought.
“When you’ve been with someone for more than half your life, a kind of emotional blindness sets in,” Smith wrote. “And it’s all too easy to lose sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties.”
Pinkett Smith is currently on a Worthy press tour, where she’s already revealed key details about her memoir. Pinkett Smith previously dropped the bombshell to People magazine that she and her husband had been separated for six years before the infamous “Oscars Slap” incident, in which Smith slapped comedian Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards . The latter had made a joke about Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, a result of her battle with alopecia.
“Jada, I love you. “GI Jane 2, I can’t wait to see it,” Rock joked, referencing the 1997 film “GI Jane,” which stars Demi Moore with a shaved head.
Smith had gone on stage and punched Rock in the face before sitting back down and screaming, “Keep my wife’s name out of your damn mouth.” Smith was forced to resign from the academy and was banned from attending academy events for the next ten years participate.
On an NBC News primetime special, Pinkett Smith said she was “shocked” that Smith called her his “wife” at the time, since they had been separated for so long.
“I think by the time we got to 2016 we were exhausted from trying,” Pinkett Smith told People. “I think we were both kind of still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.”