Source: Variety / Getty
Amid her media tour for her autobiography
Worthy, the actress sat with
PEOPLE and opened up about the Oscars slap for the first time.
She reveals that after Smith took to the stage and
smacked Chris Rock across the face, even she didn’t know it was a serious matter.
“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.”
Once alone, she asked him if he was okay and wanted him to work through his emotions, adding, “I’m going to be by his side but also allow him to have to figure this out for himself.”
The slap resulted from Rock making a
G.I. Jane joke about Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, not knowing she suffers from alopecia. Slap aside, the world heard Smith yell, “Keep my wife’s name out of your f-cking mouth” at Rock, and the consequences included Smith’s 10-year ban from the Oscars. The eventful night also saw Smith win the Best Actor Oscar for his role in
King Richard.
Pinkett-Smith gave another important tidbit surrounding the slap: she and Smith had been separated for six years at the time.
“We’re still figuring it out,” Jada says of their marriage as they round out
seven years separated. “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.”
In an interview with
Today, she explained that they’re still fighting for their bond but no longer live under the same roof.
“I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce. We will work through whatever. And I just haven’t been able to break that promise…We live separately,” she said.
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