Jada Pinkett Smith blames her “Red Table Talk” for coming off as 'adulterous wife': 'I truly didn't help'
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When Jada Pinkett Smith set out to write her first book, she didn't have a memoir in mind until December 2021, when her friend Jay Shetty, the life coach and podcaster, nudged her like a "bickering" sibling would.
"[We] kind of got into this back and forth sibling bickering thing, and I said, 'You know, this is your friend, and he is your brother. Maybe you're not seeing something that he sees,'" she reflects to EW over the phone just a week before her first memoir, Worthy, is released. "I was in meditation one day and I was like, 'Oh man, I've been on such a journey, from having this lack of self-worth to gaining this level of self-worth,' right? And I was like, 'Oh, that's it. My journey from feeling unworthy to feeling worthy.'"
Realizing this was a theme many people could relate to, Pinkett Smith poured pieces of her soul into paper, fully realizing that no matter what she says, does (or doesn't do, if we're honest), everything has a way of changing once headlines take over.
ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images Jada Pinkett Smith
"Just figuring out how close I want to be to [the media] and how far I want to be from it. I understand that I have taken back my power and understand that I have control of how close I want to be to all of it," she says. "And that is how much I want to talk to the media or how personal I want to take whatever the media has to say and how, inevitably, it's always going to be confusing, and people are going to flip things the way that they want in order to get clicks. That's just part of it. That's just what this day and time is, unfortunately. It's changed so much. The entire landscape has changed."
Read on as Pinkett Smith reveals why she wanted to set the record straight about her youth, her deep friendship with the late great rapper Tupac Shakur, her longtime marriage to Will Smith, and much more.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Writing the book had to have brought up some feelings inside of you that maybe you had been holding back or buried. Can you reflect on any of those moments and what it meant to go through them in order to write?
JADA PINKETT SMITH: I think [writing] just gives you more than holding back. It's just more of deepening a process that you already thought was getting into all the little crevices of a moment or of a circumstance. I've been going through a really deep spiritual journey, healing journey, so I really thought that there wasn't anything in the book that I hadn't really looked at. But when you write it and you have to think of "What did somebody say in this moment?" you have to think of dialogue, and I'm going back in my diaries, and I'm going through letters.
So for instance, having to relive a lot of stuff around Pac. I've got poems, I've got so many letters. I have such a vivid memory of moments of us together, that having to go back and look through his letters… I hadn't looked through his letters in years. That was really difficult, and just having his words come to life off those pages, and then figuring, really, a lot of his dialogue in the book is pretty much him, which was really important for me. But reliving that stuff, that was probably one of the most difficult areas in the book, that I really thought I had reconciled a lot of things and just realized that I hadn't. So having to go into all of these different chapters of my life, and just kind of relive them was really daunting.
What would Pac have said after reading your book?
He definitely would've called me a square again, for sure. A big old smile on his face. That is for sure! He'd have called me a square.
There's also a lot of reflection about your relationships with your mom and Will in Worthy. Have they discussed it with you?
So my mother, I went through every story with her as far as what I wanted to share within our journey, and I wanted to make sure she was aware and was on board. Will's read the whole book. Will's been really supportive through the whole process and really understood the necessity of this process for me, and has championed me along the way.
You do get into that Oscars slap moment between Will and Chris Rock. Did you have any discussions, with Will especially, about what that moment took on to mean in the media, and how it may have reflected on you and your relationship?
It's so unfortunate, just this patriarchal construct of how if a man does something unsavory, it is the woman's fault no matter what. She's the brain. And I truly didn't help that I created that false narrative at my own Red Table or allowed that false narrative, assisted that false narrative of being the adulterous wife. Surely it didn't help that moment, knowing what the societal standards or ideas of the power of the feminine and the evil temptress that can somehow make the masculine energy around her do things that he doesn't want to do.
I did find it a bit astounding of how people just ran with these assumptions. But it just goes to show you the level of sexism that still exists within our culture. I understand that people really didn't understand that moment, because Will had never done anything like that, and people just weren't privy to what was happening behind the scenes in regards to his personal journey and our journey together. But the fact that he somehow lost his ability to... That I somehow stole his autonomy in that moment was really, I mean, it was fascinating to watch, even for me. I was like, "Wow, this is..." It was quite a study on my part. But I could sit comfortably knowing, "Well, I had nothing to do with this." You know what I'm saying? And at the same time, my main focus was I really wanted to make sure that Will was okay, because something was not right.
Did that experience change how you approach the media and the projects that you're doing? The media landscape has changed, it's not just about the work anymore. They want to know everything.
I think it's the era of transparency. In this particular incident, I really do believe that as far as the Oscars was concerned, extreme situations like this can either amplify love or deteriorate it. I've learned to have such extreme acceptance for humanness and the suffering that is accompanied with it, that creates the fear that we got to see, that flipped those headlines to become what they became. And it's not personal. But people live in fear. People are really trying to figure out their own lives and are projecting a lot of their confusion and their unhappiness on others. And what's behind the media, behind a lot of pens and words are these same people. So I just have a lot of compassion and understand that this is just part of it. It's just part of the time. It's just what's happening right now. And I don't have any judgment on it. I'm just aware of it. I can either sit at home and be quiet and be fearful, or just gotta keep walking. And know that that which is not true will not stay. It just never does.
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