Jada Pinkett Smith Tells Us Whether She Regrets Marrying Will Smith 7 Years After Their Secret Separation
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“It was easy to spin the story of how the perfect Hollywood megastar had fallen to his demise because of his imperfect wife,” Jada Pinkett Smith writes in Worthy, her candid memoir that hit shelves on October 17. “Blaming the woman is nothing new.”
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Pinkett Smith’s statement comes in the penultimate chapter of the book, in which she unpacks the moment her husband, Will Smith, slapped Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars in 2022. However, her words can just as equally be applied to many other moments in their almost 26-year marriage.
For years, Pinkett Smith has been the keeper of the King Richard actor’s reputation and is so often pilloried for how her many candid admissions about her own life impact Smith. When she spoke to SheKnows ahead of the release of Worthy, Pinkett Smith told us she has become accustomed to having to answer for Smith so much so that she has no more fears about her personal life being in the zeitgeist — particularly the slap.
‘Worthy’ by Jada Pinkett Smith
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“I wasn’t afraid to thrust myself back into the conversation,” she states. “What else can anybody say? It’s all been said. Which, in itself, is a freedom. I survived that. So, it’s all good.”
Pinkett Smith’s use of the word “survived” is more literal than many realize. In the book, she speaks in depth about her battle with suicidal ideation. Not long after her 40th birthday in 2018, she selected a site in California’s winding mountainous roads where she planned to drive off the edge and end her life without it looking intentional.
It’s clear throughout the book that Pinkett Smith grapples with how her identity is so often lumped in with Smith’s and their marriage — which she reveals ended in 2016, though the couple have no plans to divorce and remain close friends and life partners.
Like many wives and mothers, she spent years trying to understand who she is outside of her marriage and kids. This tension even comes up during an ayahuasca ceremony, a transformative experience that Pinkett Smith went through around 2018. “Your kids will be better off without you here. All they need is Will. All anyone needs is Will,” she recalls a voice telling her during the psychoactive ceremony.
In the book, it’s clear that Pinkett Smith has an undying love for Smith, 55, even as their union has changed shape over the years. But it is also evident that she has almost always struggled to reconcile their love with the expectations of outside influence.
In a chapter titled “The Reluctant Bride,” Pinkett Smith makes it clear that their 1997 marriage was born out of pressures placed on her and Smith by their families when she found herself pregnant with their son, Jaden.
“My big predicament was being too scared to get married and just as scared to not get married,” she writes in Worthy. “My trepidation had nothing to do with Will — it had everything to do with my long-held belief that marriage wasn’t for me.”
With that in mind, it’s hard not to wonder if, now that she’s seven years into living independently from her husband, Pinkett Smith would still choose the traditional union of marriage with the Oscar winner.
“Sometimes you have to go to certain steps to develop into the kind of relationship that is for you,” Pinkett Smith tells us when asked if the version of herself that exists today would still marry Smith.
“If I could go back now as the Jada that I am…” she ponders before trailing off for a moment. “I mean, that’s basically what what we’ve done. We’ve come together to decide what our union needs to be for us and what works for us versus this kind of cookie cutter construct that can work for [other] people.”
The couple share Jaden, 25, and Willow, 22, in addition to Smith’s 30-year-old son from a previous marriage, Trey. Pinkett Smith says they now live apart but remain, first and foremost, a family as well as support systems in each other’s personal and professional endeavors.
“As much as people want to feel like they know the relationship of people that they see in the public eye, those two people are trying to figure out for themselves what their relationship is,” she tells us. “It’s a really intimate, subjective thing, relationships are not objective.”
With that, Pinkett Smith turns the mirror to face back at us and, in the book, she does a good job of picking apart the world’s tendency to do the same to her. Nowhere is that more evident than the reaction to the slap.
“How is it that a woman can be so irrelevant and culpable at the same time?” she asks in reference to the backlash she received after Smith’s response to Rock’s cruel joke about her shaved head, a direct result of her alopecia diagnosis. “I had to think about the narrative out there of me as the adulterous wife, who had now driven her husband to madness with the command of one look. I had to take responsibility for my part in aiding that false narrative’s existence.”
She continues: “I also had to chuckle at the idea that the world would think I wielded that amount of control over Will Smith. If I had that amount of control over Will, chile, my life would have been entirely different these damn near three decades. Real talk!“
Without negating her own role in the media storm that surrounded their marriage for 26 years, Pinkett Smith talks back to her naysayers and, in doing so, makes it clear that even though she is no longer torn down by her critics, she’s not going to go quietly. So, you might ask, who are all of Pinkett Smith’s unreserved personal admissions for if they’re not for us to judge and criticize?
“It’s really for the people who who are interested in their journey to self worth,” she says at the close of our conversation, insisting that she has no desire to be didactic or tell people how to live. “I’m just leaving breadcrumbs for people who are interested in finding their self worth, their authentic way in which they want to live and feel comfortable with that.”
Before you go, click here to see the longest celebrity marriages.
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