Try as she may, Jada Pinkett Smith can't seem to set the record straight
Much as Jada Pinkett Smith has tried to explain her marriage to Will Smith, the public continues to misinterpret her words
Will and Jada Pinkett Smith already had a tendency to overshare before each of them released a memoir where they shared even more. The duo has opened up to the public so much that it’s become a meme. (“Jada Pinkett Smith reveals that…” one viral tweet reads, ending with Meryl Streep’s feral scream from Big Little Lies.) Every word they say about each other is made into its own headline, pulled apart and dissected until it becomes incomprehensible, like staring at a painting too long until it becomes a blur of colors instead of a picture.
It’s ironic, because it seems Jada’s intention with her book Worthy is to be better understood. She’s extremely aware of the “narrative” created around her as Will Smith’s Wife, even when she was (unbeknownst to the public) not technically his wife. The infamous Oscar’s Slap was apparently about Will, his issues with Chris Rock, and his fragile mental state after filming Emancipation, according to a New York Times report, but Jada knew it would become about her reaction to Rock’s jabs. “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 told the NYT. “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!”
The biggest buzz out of the memoir press tour is that the couple “hadn’t been calling each other husband and wife in a long time” at the time of the Oscars, though her sense of loyalty and their mutual commitment to their family compelled her to stand by him in the Slap aftermath and, well, all the rest of that time where we all thought they were still married. In fact, despite the fact that she described herself to the NYT as an “urban nun” abstaining from sex (among other things), the pair is still committed to working on their marriage.
After dropping the bombshell that she and Will had been separated for years in an interview with Hoda Kotb, Jada came to Today on Monday morning to clarify to Kotb where things stand. The couple are in a “deep, healing space” and are “working hard” on the marriage, which was “totally missed” in their initial interview. “We are working very hard at bringing our relationship together. Back to a life partnership,” she told Kotb. “The beautiful about it is like, this whole journey, as difficult as it’s been, just brought Will and I closer in such an authentic way. Instead of trying to be a thing, it’s like just tearing all that down and finding what’s true between us. It’s been difficult, but beautiful.”
Yet no matter how clear Jada is—coming on TV to correct the record, being remarkably frank on her own show Red Table Talk, or spelling everything out in her memoir—the media, or the general public, continues to misinterpret her. Much of the memes around her memoir (as they have been throughout her marriage) have to do with her close relationship to Tupac Shakur. One viral tweet jokes about Jada wishing Will had been assassinated, rather than Shakur; another, from the “Hip Hop Ties” account, casts aspersions on Will for supporting a book in which Jada described the late rapper as her soulmate.
Yet Jada’s book—and all her comments about her friendship with Shakur—is clear that their relationship was purely platonic. She writes in her book that they once tried to kiss as kids and they both “recoiled in disgust” (per the NYT). She views his proposal to her while he was in prison as an act of desperation: “Did Pac love me? Yeah he loved me! But I promise you, had we got married, he’d have divorced my ass as soon as he walked through them damn gates and got out.”
These details become obfuscated as they trickle into public consumption, getting pull-quoted on social media by accounts like Pop Crave or Pop Tingz or Pop Base and spun into Frankenstein narratives about cuckolded husbands and indifferent wives. Will, at least, has positioned himself above this narrative, showing staunch support for her literary endeavors. He praised his wife (if that is the appropriate term) in an email to the NYT, calling her compassionate and resilient. He wrote that her memoir woke him up: “When you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life, a sort of emotional blindness sets in, and you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties.”
“That’s so universal in relationships,” Jada responded to his statement on Today. “He didn’t see me, and I didn’t see him. And so we kind of had to go our separate ways to see each other. Because when you’re in a relationship and you’re kind of just pulling at that person to be something for you, you refuse to see them. And so we had to go our separate ways to really look at ourselves and see the blocks that we had in order to find a way back.”
Nevertheless, Will is just as aware as Jada is of the media firestorm that constantly surrounds them. “Notifications off,” he wrote in the caption of an Instagram video in which he can be seen napping on a boat. Jada commented with laughing emojis. The Smiths may be too evolved to care what the rest of us think—though clearly they’ll continue to share their thoughts with us, regardless.