Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
Jada Pinkett-Smith has a lot of things that she wants to clear up. In her new memoir, Worthy, the actress, musician and wife of megastar Will Smith addresses the now-infamous public assault heard around the world: when Smith struck comedian Chris Rock onstage at the Oscars after Rock cracked a joke about Pinkett-Smith’s alopecia-induced bald head. The smack also captured Pinkett-Smith in the same miniature diorama of pop culture drama–but things are even more complicated than we’d previously thought.
According to Pinkett-Smith, when Smith screamed, “Keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth,” at Rock, he was speaking out of turn, in a sense. One of the several genuinely surprising revelations in the book is that the power couple has been secretly un-coupled, and living totally separate lives, since 2016.
“Will and I had pictures in our mind of what a happily married couple was,” Pinkett-Smith writes. “And our pictures didn’t match. Inevitably, we came to the proverbial stage of irreconcilable differences. That realization became starkly apparent by 2016. We had been here before. There had been several on-again and off-again attempts at salvaging the marriage. We were tired from not finding a middle ground. We’d been on a seesaw for too long.”