Jada Pinkett Smith gets real about her addictions: sex, exercise, and alcohol
Jada Pinkett Smith, now 46, is all about being authentic on her Facebook Watch show, Red Table Talk. So on Monday’s show about addiction, the Girls Trip actress candidly answered a fan’s question about whether she’s ever had one.
“Yes, I’ve had several,” she said. “My sort of addictions jump. They jump around. When I was younger, I definitely think I had a sex addiction of some kind, yes.”
She thought that “everything could be fixed by sex.”
For her, it wasn’t necessarily the amount of sex that was the problem.
“It’s not what you’re doing, but who you’re with, why you’re doing it. It’s the behavior that’s attached to it,” Smith said. “Because if you want to have a lot of sex, that’s great, but why are you having all that sex? That’s what you gotta look at, you know what I mean?”
Smith also talked about a problem with excessive exercise and a struggle with alcohol that she’s mentioned in the past.
“Then I became a gym addict. I was just in the gym constantly,” she said. “And then I remember reaching the rock bottom, that time I was in the house by myself, and I had those two bottles of wine and was going for the third bottle, and it was like, ‘Now hold up. You in this house by yourself going for your third bottle of wine. You might have a problem.’ So I went cold turkey.”
In 2010, Smith revealed to Us Weekly that she’d already been sober for 13-plus years. She gave up alcohol around the same time she married husband Will Smith in 1997, which was not a coincidence, as she told Redbook in July 2011.
“I went through a time where there were lots of drugs and alcohol, and really, I was on the brink of death. And then Will scooped me up, brushed me off, and said, ‘There’s a diamond somewhere under here.’ I always knew there was something better for me out there, but the question was, did I want to take the journey to get to it? When Will came along, I had a reason.”
Smith’s sister-in-law, Will’s youngest sister Ashley Marie, joined Smith at the table and talked about her journey with marijuana. R&B singer August Alsina, a longtime Smith family friend, revealed his struggle with pain pills.
While Smith’s daughter Willow wasn’t part of the episode, Jada’s other regular co-host, mother Adrienne Banfield-Jones, was there, opening up about her heroin addiction Jada has talked about in the past. The Nutty Professor star once told Howard Stern that being a kid with a drug-addicted mother was “more scary than confusing because you’re pretty much on your own.”
Smith and her mom both teared up a few times.
“It’s difficult to talk about something that is gonna go out to the world,” Banfield-Jones said. “I couldn’t hide the unmanageability of my life, and the emotional damage and the spiritual damage I did to myself and to her. That was devastating. I abused drugs for over 20 years.”
She’s now been sober for 27 years.
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