A crush, infidelities and a (not) divorce: Jada Pinkett and Will Smith, story of a toxic marriage

Yes OK Will Smith He yelled at her, “Keep my wife’s name out of your damn mouth!” » to the actor Chris Roche during the ceremony of Oscar 2022 before giving him a slap that is remembered, the truth is that there is something inaccurate in this sentence. Jada Pinkett and Will Smith They have been separated for seven years . She herself confirmed this in her recently published memoir.

“We’re still seeing how we get on . We did a lot of work together. We have a deep love for each other and we are going to discover what this situation looks like for us,” Pinkett Smith wrote in the volume, which runs just over 400 pages.

How it all began? Smith and Pinkett met while filming the memorable series The Prince of Rap (which was seen in Chile on Channel 13 screens). Pinkett auditioned for the role of Will’s girlfriend, but didn’t get it. However, there was some chemistry between the two. They stayed in touch, even though at the time Will was married to Sheree Zampino with whom he has his son Trey.

For Smith, Jada wondered. “I realized I wasn’t with the person I was supposed to be with. I was sitting on the toilet and crying and laughing uncontrollably, I knew [que Jada] This was the woman he was meant to be with, but I have never divorced… So I went out, sat down with Sheree, we talked and I decided to move on with my life,” he commented in 2018. Shortly after, in 1995, he broke up with Sheree and rushed to see Jada. Outright, he asked her to go out with him. She, who was single, accepted.

They got married two years later, in 1997, and over time, offspring arrived. In 1998, they had his first son -Jaden-, then a girl, Willow, in 2000. Both grew up with a sense of independence. “I think the best gift I can give my children is the freedom to be who they are. Jada and I take the issue very seriously,” Smith told BET in 2016.

Over time, relationships suffer the costs of attrition. In fact, back in 2013, rumors were circulating that the two were opting for a open relationship which Pinkett categorically denied on his social networks: “Will and I can both do whatever we want, because We trust each other. This doesn’t mean we’re in an open relationship, it means “We are in a mature relationship.”

Two years later, it was Will who shared the same rumors and ruled out any breakup between the two. “Under normal circumstances, I generally don’t respond to nonsense. But so many people offered me their “deepest condolences” that I thought, “Damn… I can be stupid too!” »,” he wrote on Facebook at the time. “So, for the sake of redundancy, repetition, over and over again… Jada and I…WE ARE NOT DIVORKING! “.

However, wear and tear inevitably began to show. In 2018, it was revealed that the two were no longer talking about getting married. “We just don’t say we are anymore. We consider each other life partners. There’s no deal breaker and Jada can’t do anything that will break our relationship. She has my support until death “and it feels good to reach this agreement”, Will explained on the Rap Radar podcast.

Even soon, we knew extramarital affair What Pinkett she stayed with the American rapper August Alsina, who claimed to have received the pass from Smith himself. “I actually sat down with Will and had a conversation about turning their marriage into a lifelong partnership that they’ve talked about many times and that doesn’t involve romance.”

Jada Pinkett did not deny it, and confirmed it “We’ve decided that we’re going to go our separate ways for a while and you’ll figure out how to make yourself happy and I’ll figure out how to make me happy,” Jada expressed at the time. “From there, over time, I found myself in a different type of entanglement with August… Yeah, it was totally a relationship.”

From then on, both agree on one point: neither wants a divorce. In his memoir, Smith commented that marriage was “the brutal death of our romantic fantasies, the burning away of the idealistic illusion of the perfect marriage and the perfect family.” Neither of us wanted a divorce; We knew we loved each other and certain aspects of our union were magical. But the structure of life we ​​had established was strangling us both.

Jada Pinkett confirmed along the same lines: “I made a promise that we will never have a reason to divorce. We will work on anything. And I just couldn’t break that promise. Therefore, the actress was surprised that Smith called her “his wife” during the incident with Rock.

“Even though we hadn’t called each other husband and wife for a long time, I said, ‘I’m his wife now. We are in there. “This is who I am,” he told me, adding, “This is the gift I have to give, like, ‘Hey, I’m going to be with you.'”