Comedian Leslie Jones has revealed that friend Chris Rock sought counselling after he was slapped by Will Smith at the Oscars in 2022.
The actor, 54, received a 10-year ban from the prestigious award show after striking Rock across the face during last year’s ceremony for making an insensitive joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith, who suffers from the autoimmune disease alopecia, which causes hair loss.
The incident made international headlines at the time and Smith later issued an apology, saying at one point: “I was out of line and I was wrong. I am embarrassed.”
Reflecting on the incident 18 months on, Jones, 56, revealed that Rock had to go to therapy with his daughters, Lola, 21, and Zahra, 19, after he was left humiliated.
She told People magazine: “That s**t was humiliating. It really affected him. People need to understand his daughters, his parents saw that. He had to go to counseling with his daughters.”
Sharing her own thoughts on the slap, the former SNL alum said she was left “infuriated” by Smith’s actions as a result of a “joke”.
“It made me so infuriated,” she continued. “You don’t know that I was going to jump in my car and roll up there [to the 2022 Oscars]. I was so f**king mad on so many levels. For a long-ass time I was just mad. Chris Rock did a f**king joke.
“I know Will too… I was like, you couldn’t handle that shit afterwards. This is the Oscars. The whole world is watching.”
Jones maintained that Smith “could have still fixed it” when he accepted his Best Actor honour for King Richard.
She suggested that he should have acknowledged his actions by inviting Rock back on the Dolby Theatre stage during his acceptance speech and declined the award because of his behaviour.
Back in March, Rock used the incident as a basis for his stand-up special with Netflix, which dropped a week before this year’s Academy Awards.
The new material in Chris Rock: Selective Outrage also included other stinging remarks about Smith and his wife, including her extramarital affair with August Alsina.
The couple both discussed the actress’s “entanglement” during an episode of her Facebook show Red Table Talk back in 2020.
