When Will Smith Said His Wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s Statement About Their Marriage Woke Him Up

Throwback to when Will Smith had replied to the explosive claims made by his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, in her upcoming book, Worthy. The New York Times released an email from Will Smith in which he responded to the personal revelations in Jada's upcoming biography, Worthy. Will's remarks follow Jada's disclosure that they've been privately separated for seven years.

Will told the outlet, "When you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life, a sort of emotional blindness sets in. And you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties." Jada spoke out about her struggles with depression in an interview with Today's Hoda KOTB. She said, "I think 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. I made a promise that there would never be a reason for us to get a divorce. We will work through whatever. I just haven't been able to break that promise."

Pinkett Smith, sat down with the Today co-host to discuss the condition of her marriage with Smith and disclosed why she had never addressed the condition of their marriage publicly. She confessed, "[We were] still trying to figure out between the two of us how to be in partnership, right, and how do we present that to people, you know? And we hadn’t figured that out." In another interview with People, Jada opened up about her relationship and the 2022 Chris Rock incident. In 2022, Jada sat in the front row at the Oscars and witnessed her husband, Will, smack Chris Rock on the Oscar stage live on television after Rock had made a joke about her newly shaven head. 

During the interview, she confessed that she thought the whole incident "was a skit" and she couldn't wrap her head around the fact that it "was real". She 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."

She recalled her first date with Will and added, "Will called me up one day and said, ’Hit me when you get to L.A.’ and then ... click. And I was like, ‘Whoa. Okay.’ And so when I got to L.A., I called him. I haven't been able to get rid of him since." She further added, "Once I met Will, I completely abandoned my mental health. I was so intoxicated by him and our dynamic. I really felt like I'm cured. He became the drug." Talking about the current state of her marriage she concluded, "We’re still figuring it out. We’ve been doing some really heavy-duty work together. We just got a deep love for each other and we are going to figure out what that looks like for us."

Editor's note: This article was originally published on October 16, 2023. It has since been updated.