Jada Pinkett Smith dropped some bombshells on the public in conjunction with the release of her memoir Worthy, including the fact that she and her husband Will Smith have been living apart for the past seven years.
The Set it Off star told “Today’s” Hoda Kotb on Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2023, that she and Smith have long stopped being romantic with each other.
“It was not a divorce on paper,” Kotb responds to get clarification.
“Right,” Pinkett Smith answers.
“But it was a divorce,” Kotb says.
“Divorce,” Pinkett Smith emphasizes.
Pinkett Smith added that she and Smith were simply “just not ready yet” to explain their situation publicly. They are “still trying to figure out between the two of us how to be in partnership. … In regards to, how do we present that to people? We hadn’t figured that out.”
When Kotb inquired what precipitated the marital “fracture,” Pinkett Smith provided a vague answer.
“Why it fractured … that — that’s a lot of things … By the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying. I think we were both kind of just still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be,” she says.
“We’re still figuring it out,” is what Pinkett Smith also shared with People magazine.
“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.”
Pinkett Smith also shared with People that she was also shocked by her Oscar-winning husband marching on the stage during the 2022 Academy Awards and lowering the smackdown on Chris Rock. She, like millions of others, thought the slap was part of some skit she was not privy to.
Despite what happened between Smith and Rock, Pinkett Smith vowed to stay in his corner.
“I’m going to be by his side,” she said, “but also allow him to have to figure this out for himself.”
