Jada Pinkett Smith Opens Up About What Happened After the Infamous ‘Oscars Slap’ 

Jada Pinkett Smith is giving fans more details about the events that unfolded before, during, and after the infamous ‘Oscars Slap’ at the 2022 Academy Awards – when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock for cracking a joke about Jada’s shaved head and told him to, “Keep my wife’s name out your f***ing mouth.”

In a new interview with TODAY’s Hoda Kotb – which airs in full on Friday (Oct. 13) at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT on NBC – Jada opens up about what Chris said to her after the incident occurred and how she somehow got painted as the bad guy (since Will appeared to be laughing at the joke until he saw Jada rolling her eyes).

In fact, she blamed that narrative on what she describes as the ‘false narrative’ that she ‘helped to create on Red Table Talk’ – referring to a conversation she had with Will on her former talk show on Facebook Watch, where she talked about her ‘entanglement’ with August Alsina while they were briefly separated.

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That conversation created a narrative that she was ‘the adulterous wife, who forced him to go to the table and sit there’ and the narrative was blown out of context when the slap occurred. “Now look at what she’s done. She has the power with an eye roll to make him go up and slap somebody on stage,” Jada said.

Jada Pinkett Smith went on to agree with Hoda Kotb when she said the tirade by Will Smith was ‘totally out of character’ – with Jada adding that ‘it’s not him whatsoever.’ She also provided some new details about what went down after the slap – when snippets for the best documentary nominees were shown. 

Chris allegedly looked at Jada and told her he ‘meant no harm.’ Of course, Jada couldn’t fully process the apology at that moment because she was more concerned about Will. “I'm just out of it because I'm really worried about Will. And Will's still talking. Now he’s mad because Chris is talking to me,” Jada explained.

She ultimately told Chris that ‘this is about some old s**t’ because that’s all she could think of at the time. In fact, she thought it was a skit when it all started and was blown away at the incident – just like the rest of us. She also revealed that she and Will had been separated for roughly six years before the slap. 

Jada Pinkett Smith Says Chris Rock Once Asked Her Out

Of all the things Jada Pinkett Smith is revealing in her tell-all memoir – Worthy, which is out Oct. 17 – and her press tour, there’s one revelation that piques our interest more than most. In her recent interview with Hoda Kotb, the 52-year-old claiming that Chris Rock tried to shoot his shot with her several years ago. 

“So he called me and basically he was like, ‘I’d love to take you out.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ He was like, ‘Well, aren’t you and Will getting a divorce?’ I was like, ‘No. Chris, those are just rumors.’ He was appalled. And he profusely apologized, and that was that,” she said of him asking her out on a date. 

She goes on to reveal that, while she and Will Smith aren’t legally divorced, they haven’t been together since 2016. She clarified that they’ve been living completely different lives since then and that the only reason they’re still together is because she doesn’t want to break a promise she made to him years ago.

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“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 said of her broken relationship with Will Smith. Tune in to her full interview tonight!