Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero / The Daily Beast / Getty
You could be forgiven for believing we had moved on from Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards by now. Somehow, however, we’re back talking about it, thanks mostly to Jada Pinkett Smith’s new memoir Worthy, which has apparently been serialized in its entirety as the media attempts to squeeze as many bombshells from its pages as possible. The book has exhumed the discourse surrounding The Slap—yep, we’re capitalizing it—from its deceptively shallow grave and, unsurprisingly, the moment’s most important context is being ignored.
In case you were lucky enough to avoid the extensive coverage The Slap received at the time, it goes something like this. Chris Rock turned up at the 2022 Oscars to present the Academy Award for best documentary feature, during which he made a remark aimed at Jada Pinkett Smith, saying, “Jada, I love you. ‘GI Jane 2,’ can’t wait to see you alright.”
The “joke,” if you can even call it that, was a reference to Pinkett Smith’s shaved head and alopecia, an autoimmune skin disease in which the immune system attacks healthy hair follicles and causes hair loss—with which Pinkett Smith has publicly stated she has struggled.