Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s almost 30-year-long partnership has had its fair share of controversy.
From rebranding affairs to “entanglements” following Pinkett Smith’s extra-marital relationship with rapper August Alsina, to publicly discussing their sex life in a 2021 episode of Pinkett Smith’s talk show Red Table Talk, to the infamous Oscars slap, the Hollywood couple’s “unconventional” relationship is regularly the talk of tinsel town. No more than now, after Pinkett Smith herself dropped the bombshell news yesterday that the pair have actually been separated for seven years.
Speaking on the Today show, Pinkett Smith told interviewer Hoda Kotb that she and Smith have been separated and have lived "completely separate lives" since 2016, nearly 20 years after their marriage in 1997. She also confirmed that the pair live apart.
But, as of yet, no divorce plans are in the works. “I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce,” Pinkett Smith said. “We will work through whatever. And I just haven’t been able to break that promise.”
It’s basically over, and yet we still can’t stop talking about it. So what exactly about their relationship are the tabloids, the public and even their celebrity pals so fascinated by? Let’s look back at how this picturesque relationship got flipped-turned upside down.
Becoming Mr & Mrs Smith
When Smith saw Pinkett on A Different World, he knew had to meet her. “I knew there was something in our energy that would be magic,” he recalls in a 2018 Red Table Talk episode. The actor even went to a taping of A Different World to try and woo the young star, but instead ended up meeting his first wife, actress-turned-reality TV star Sheree Zampino.
It wasn’t until 1994 that Smith and Pinkett would meet when Pinkett auditioned for the role of Smith’s girlfriend on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Although she didn’t secure the role, Smith was absolutely smitten with the Menace II Society actress.
“I had a realisation I wasn’t with the person I was supposed to be with,” he said on a Red Table Talk episode in 2018. “I was sitting in a [bathroom] stall and I was crying and laughing uncontrollably, and I knew [Jada] was the woman I was supposed to be with.”
They started dating seriously in 1995 after Smith finalised his divorce with Zampino, who he shares a son, Trey Smith, with. “Are you seeing anybody?” He recalls asking her. When she said no, Smith said: “Cool. You’re seeing me now.”
Within two years they had married in Baltimore, welcoming their first son Jayden Smith, now a rapper and actor, in 1998, and their daughter Willow, now a singer and actress, in 2000.
The “most disgusting display of ego” behind their first separation
After a relatively quiet decade-and-a-half making movies and raising their children, things started to unravel in 2011.
For Pinkett Smith’s 40th birthday party, Smith threw a three-day extravaganza that took place in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It reportedly took him three years to plan, with Smith even creating a documentary about his wife’s family and hiring Mary J. Blige to perform after a dinner which included a 20-foot-long archway adorned with photos of Pinkett Smith.
However, Pinkett Smith wasn’t keen on the party, saying it was "the most disgusting display of ego I have ever seen in my life," and demanded he cancel the rest of the weekend. After the argument, Smith said he told his wife: "I retire. I retire from trying to make you happy… I quit – you go do you, and I’m-a go do me." While the couple said they "didn’t want a divorce", Smith said they needed time to be apart.
This period is understood to have had a strain on Smith, who discussed the experience in a trailer for the 2021 docuseries Best Shape Of My Life. He said: "What you’ve come to understand as Will Smith, the alien-annihilating MC, bigger-than-life movie star, is largely a construction - a carefully crafted and honed character designed to protect myself, to hide myself from the world, to hide the coward."
Eventually, the two were able to compromise and reconcile after embracing what Smith called in his self titled 2021 memoir “the power of loving in freedom,” which allowed them to be “simultaneously one hundred percent bound together and one hundred percent free.”
The open marriage rumours begin
In 2013, Pinkett Smith took to Facebook to address rumours she and her husband were in an open relationship, as only someone in 2013 would do.
“Here is how I will change my statement... Will and I BOTH can do WHATEVER we want, because we TRUST each other to do so. This does NOT mean we have an open relationship... this means we have a GROWN one.”
This wasn’t the only time the two referred to their marriage in fluid and confusing terms. In a 2018 episode of TIDAL’s Rap Radar podcast, Smith said they don’t see themselves as married. “We refer to ourselves as life partners, where you get into that space where you realise you are literally with somebody for the rest of your life. There’s no deal breakers. There’s nothing she could do – ever. Nothing that would break our relationship.”
However, in a 2021 GQ cover story Smith finally confirmed that “for the large part of our relationship, monogamy was what we chose,” however, they were now “not thinking of monogamy as the only relational perfection.”
Later that year, Oprah Winfrey interviewed the Men in Black star about his relationship with Jada. “I think the difficulty that people have and difficulty in discussing it is people only think in terms of sex,” he told the billionaire talk show host. “People are trying to put something on it: ‘Will and Jada—what they doing with other people?’ Will and Jada ain’t really doing too much of nothin. Will and Jada are on a spiritual journey to cleanse the poisonous, unloving parts of our hearts. And we’re doing it together in this lifetime no matter what.”
The “entanglement” scandal
In 2020 rapper August Alsina claimed he had an affair with Pinkett Smith and that her husband had given them his blessing during an interview with Angela Yee.
The two reportedly met in 2015 at her children Jaden and Willow’s concert in London, and they struck up a friendship. "He asked me that day, ‘Man, I could really use some help dealing with life,’" Pinkett Smith said on a 2018 episode of her Red Table Talk. "And then [I came] to find out that he was abusing Percocet [prescription painkiller]."
The friendship eventually turned romantic, with Alsina revealing that they were together for four and a half years and that he “truly and really, really, deeply loved” her.
A few weeks later the Smiths addressed the rumours on an episode of Red Table Talk. “We decided that we were going to separate for a period of time and you go figure out how to make yourself happy and I’ll figure out how to make myself happy,” Smith said, while Pinkett Smith added, “From there, as time went on, I got into a different kind of entanglement with August…Yes, it was a relationship absolutely.”
That said, Pinkett Smith denied that Smith ever gave permission to August, saying, “One thing I want to clean up…about you giving ‘permission,’ which is…the only person that can give permission in that circumstance is myself.”
The relationship between Pinkett Smith and Alsina had since ended, and the Smiths appeared to remain happily married afterwards. “Me and Jada, to this day, if we start talking, it’s four hours. It’s four hours if we exchange a sentence. It’s the center of why we’ve been able to sustain [our relationship] and why we are still together, not choking the life out of each other—the ability to work through issues,” said Smith during his 2021 interview with Winfrey. “I’ve never met another person that I connect with in conversation more blissfully and productively than Jada.” Little did we know...
Their relationship has been over for seven years
When Jada Pinkett Smith properly dug into the Oscars 2022 slap scandal in her Today show interview yesterday, she did more than reveal how she felt about the defensive attack from Smith. She also revealed that she and Smith had not been together in an official sense for seven years.
The conversation came ahead of the release of her memoir, Worthy, out on October 17. In the book, Pinkett Smith opens up even more about her and Smith’s relationship, from how it started to where it stands now.
She explains the breakdown of their relationship tentatively in the interview. “Why it fractured... that, that’s a lot of things... By the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying. I think we were both kind of just still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.”
While Pinkett Smith likens the separation to a divorce, she says she couldn’t go through with a full legal divorce. “I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce. We will work through... whatever. I just haven’t been able to break that promise.”
As of yet, Will Smith has yet to reply to her comments, but you best believe there will be plenty more headlines to come from October 17 onwards when Worthy hits the shelves.
