HATFIELD, Unitesd Kingdom (VOICE OF NAIJA) – American actor Will Smith has responded for the first time to Jada Pinkett Smith‘s revelations in her new memoir, Worthy, which she is heavily promoting in the media and is out on Tuesday.
Smith sent The New York Times an email saying the book’s revelations “kind of woke [him] up.”
He said that Pinkett Smith was more “resilient, clever and compassionate than [he’d] understood,” and had lived a life on the edge more than he’d realized.
“When you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life, a sort of emotional blindness sets in,” Smith wrote, according to the Times article published Saturday. “And you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties.”
Pinkett Smith said their relationship is still being defined and the couple would not divorce.
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Previously, Pinkett Smith had 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 product of her struggle with alopecia.
“Jada, I love you. ‘G. I. Jane 2,’ can’t wait to see it,” Rock had joked, referencing the 1997 movie “G. I. Jane,” which stars Demi Moore with a shaved head.
Smith had gone up on stage and slapped Rock across the face before sitting back down and yelling, “Keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth.”
Smith was forced to resign from the Academy and banned from attending Academy events for the next 10 years.
In an NBC News primetime special, Pinkett Smith said that she was “shocked” Smith had called her his “wife” at that time since they had been separated for so long.
“I think by the time we got to 2016 we were just exhausted with trying,” the Girls Trip actress said, referring to the state of their union.
“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. We will work through whatever,” she continued. “And I just haven’t been able to break that promise.”