Jada Pinkett Smith Says Chris Rock Approached Her After Will Smith Slap and Said ‘I Didn’t Mean You Any Harm’ — She Hasn’t ‘Talked to Chris Since’
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Jada Pinkett Smith revealed to People magazine that she has not spoken to Chris Rock since the night of the 2022 Oscars, when Will Smith slapped Rock across the face after the comedian made a joke about Jada’s bald head onstage. Rock’s joke was divisive because of Jada’s alopecia.
“No, I haven’t talked to Chris…[Do I have] any desire to talk to Chris? Here’s my desire: I just hope that all the misunderstanding around this can be cleared up and that there can be peace,” Jada told the publication.
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Was she offended by Rock’s joke? “I mean, that’s what comedians do,” Jada said. “I would just have to say that I am not really here to make any judgment on how people decide to express themselves and express their art. I’ll say that several times I’ve had my feelings hurt, for sure. I’ve had my feelings hurt a lot by Chris. But at the end of the day, too, being in the spotlight, it comes with the territory.”
While Chris Rock and Jada have not spoken since the night of the 2022 Oscars, Jada did reveal for the first time that Rock went off the stage and went up to her immediately after the slap.
“Chris came down to the end of the stage and tried to apologize to me,” Jada said. “He said, ‘I didn’t mean you any harm.’ I said, ‘I can’t talk about this now, Chris. This is some old shit.’ I thought this was [about] the Oscar 2016 and… their stuff that they had before I even came into the picture in the late ‘80s. I’ve got to leave that to Will and Chris to talk about, but they got their stuff for sure.”
For Jada, the 2016 Oscars appeared to play into the 2022 Oscars slap. Back in 2016, Jada publicly protested the Academy Awards ceremony amid the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, in which the awards failed to nominate a single person of color in the four acting categories. Rock was the host that year (and even made a Jada protest joke in his monologue), and Jada said he might’ve been offended by her comments against the ceremony.
“There might be some misunderstanding between Chris and I as far as the 2016 Oscars. I think that he might’ve taken offense, which I meant no harm in offending,” Jada said. “That wasn’t my intention. But I do think that there’s a big misunderstanding there.”
“I probably should have called him and gone, ‘Hey, are you okay? And just know that although I’m speaking out about the Oscars, I do wish you the best and I just want you to know that,'” Jada added, noting that she should’ve taken the time to touch base with him since he was hosting. “His feelings might’ve been hurt.”
The two of them did speak after the 2016 Oscars. “He apologized and I apologized to him as well,” Jada said. “So I actually thought that we were good, that the hatchet was buried between us. And we hadn’t talked since then, until 2022 came.”
Jada also revealed that Rock once reached out to ask her to go on a date while rumors were circulating about her possible divorce from Will.
“I think every summer all the reports would come out that me and Will were getting a divorce,” Jada said. “And this particular summer, Chris, he thought that we were getting a divorce. 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.”
Jada and Will are not divorced, but she did recently reveal that they have been secretly separated for the last seven years. Six of those years pre-dated the Oscars slap, which Jada originally thought was a skit in the moment.
“I thought, ‘This is a skit,’” Jada 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.”
Jada’s new memoir, “Worthy,” will be released on Oct. 17.
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