A pre-slap premonition. Life-saving ayahuasca. Jada Pinkett Smith unveils ‘surreal’ secrets
The Oscar slap was one of the most “surreal” events of Jada Pinkett Smith’s life. But she can’t say she didn’t see it coming.
In her upcoming memoir, “Worthy,” the actress, “Red Table Talk” creator and gossip-generating wife of Will Smith says she had a “premonition” just before her husband smacked Chris Rock onstage during the 94th Academy Awards.
“It flashed through my mind as Chris Rock’s face came across the screen. ... In fact, my stomach clenched,” she recalls. “He had been known to take swipes at me — and from the Oscar stage no less.”
One such swipe was in 2016, amid the #OscarsSoWhite controversy. Pinkett Smith had shared online her “disappointment” with the lack of diversity among acting nominees and questioned whether people of color should attend. During Rock’s opening monologue as host, he joked, “Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s panties. I wasn’t invited.”
So when she made the eye-roll seen ’round the world at the 2022 Oscars after Rock poked fun at her baldness, a symptom of alopecia, by comparing her to movie character G.I. Jane, it wasn’t just a response to a lame joke but a realization that her hunch had come to pass. “Just like I’d thought, [Rock] wasn’t able to help himself.”
Actor and TV host Jada Pinkett Smith went public with her alopecia diagnosis in 2018. Here’s what she’s said about hair loss since.
Conceding that it was “indeed a very light joke,” she writes that it wasn’t about her: “My heart broke for the many [with alopecia] who live in shame, the children who have committed suicide after being teased. And now the Oscars, in all its political correctness, was telling the world it was okay to make jokes at the expense of a woman suffering from alopecia?”
As for the slap itself, she initially thought it was a “skit,” and only realized Smith had made contact when their publicists told them Rock would not press charges. “Press charges — for what?” she had asked.
Looking back, it was “disturbing,” she writes, to see “conflict of that nature displayed between two Black men on a ‘white’ stage ... as was watching a Black man insult a Black woman on a ‘white’ stage. Once again.”
The moment culminated “decades of disrespect between Will and Chris.” But it was just one of many intense experiences shared in her book, available Oct. 17. From the truth about her mysterious marriage to suicidal thoughts, a kiss with Tupac and the joys of ayahuasca, here are the worthiest revelations from “Worthy.”
Last year’s Oscars went sideways when Will Smith struck Chris Rock as millions watched. “‘The Slap’: One Year Later” explains why it still matters.
She claims she knew she was pregnant within seconds of having sex.
Pinkett Smith’s premonition of the Oscars slap wasn’t the only one that came true. During a late 1997 summer rendezvous in Cabo San Lucas with then-boyfriend Will Smith, she claims she knew “the second” they conceived, turning to Will in bed to declare, “I’m pregnant.”
The feeling was like being “inside a bank vault,” she recalls. “There’s a lock that looks like a big round steering wheel. When you turn it, it locks with a CLICK. That’s what it felt like in my womb.”
Will Smith sat up and instructed her to “jump up and down” and “stand on your head.” He then called a buddy to laugh about her belief that a baby was on the way, before “the little ones have even stopped swimming.” As Will laughed, Jada cried “all night long.”
Two weeks later, she took five pregnancy tests that were all positive. Son Jaden Smith was born early the following July.
She was ‘scared as hell’ to marry Will Smith.
Pinkett Smith was trying to rest amid “all-day” pregnancy sickness when Will came over and proposed. She recalls him saying there was “no way” he’d have a baby without marrying her.
“All I could do was cry” during the proposal. “[It] was beautiful and sincere, but I was scared as hell.”
In part, she just hadn’t thought marriage was for her. The next day in Beverly Hills, she bought her own engagement ring to help convince herself to “get with the program.”
During the ceremony on New Year’s Eve, 1997, she was “straight-up bawling” as she walked down the aisle, feeling “happy and sad ... triumphant and uncertain.”
She and Will have been separated, living apart, for seven years.
When Will Smith famously screamed at Rock, “Keep my wife’s name out of your f— mouth,” it was an honest moment of rage but also a slight fib. Pinkett Smith reveals that she’s not really his wife anymore — and hasn’t been for seven years. Though they are still legally married, they separated in 2016.
It’s one reason why she was confused by his violent reaction to Rock’s joke. “I [was] unclear on the reason why Will [was] so upset,” she says. “We had been living separate lives and were there as family, not as husband and wife.”
She shares the stories of how she first met — and kissed — Tupac Shakur.
Pinkett Smith felt an “immediate connection” when she first laid eyes on Tupac, then 15, at the Baltimore School of the Arts. They quickly became inseparable, with a bond that “would impact my life forever.”
During their teen years, she dared him to kiss her on the back porch of her home, where she lived with her mother, “a full-blown, high-functioning heroin addict” at the time. Her father was absent, her stepfather estranged.
Tupac and Pinkett Smith realized they lacked romantic chemistry, but he would come to fill a critical role in her life.
“Pac made up for the lack of male protection and care I sought,” she writes. She also helped take care of him, buying him clothes and shoes at a time when the up-and-coming rapper couldn’t always get three meals a day.
Later, at an amusement park, they recorded a music video together, lip-syncing to the Fresh Prince, with whom “I would become, um, very well acquainted.” Call it another premonition.
She once jumped out of a car to escape a boyfriend’s rage.
Pinkett Smith refers to a former “Hollywood-type” romantic partner as Lance. They were set up by their publicists and managers in the fall of 1994. One night in New York, when he was behind the wheel after drinking, Lance had an “explosive reaction” and slammed his fist on the dashboard.
She worried she’d be next. She “threw the car door open and jumped out in my flat sandals and skirt” before running to Lance’s house and arming herself with a kitchen knife. A friend helped them deescalate the fight, and she escaped on a plane to L.A. the next day.
“I never saw Lance again — alone, that is.”
She planned to make suicide look like an accident ‘for the sake of my kids.’
Pinkett Smith shares a history of suicidal thoughts starting at age 21, when her Hollywood career was booming. “The more I tried to unthink the image of slitting my wrist, the more afraid I became that I would actually do it.”
Drowning in a “tidal wave of sadness,” Pinkett Smith asked her mom to immediately fly to L.A., “because if you don’t, I’m going to kill myself.” At her mother’s suggestion, she tried therapy, which she credits for saving her life.
At 40, however, suicidal thoughts returned. Still working through PTSD, unhappy in her marriage, she “wanted to be on this earth less and less.” Pinkett Smith would frequently drive around a turn on Mulholland Drive, pulling over to consider staging a “fatal accident that wouldn’t look intentional — for the sake of my kids.”
Her only hesitation was “that I might not die.” But she felt determined to find a cliff high enough to guarantee her demise. “The world had become less heavy now that I had a solution, a plan for my own exit, and I was resolved.”
A list of crisis hotlines, low-fee and sliding scale counseling, support groups, and mindfulness and meditation services
The ‘magical’ hallucinogenic drug ayahuasca helped save her life.
Life took an better turn after she was introduced to ayahuasca — “in our living room, no less” — by son Jaden and his teenage friends, whom she considers surrogate sons.
Moises and Mateo, 17 and 15, described their father’s recent experience with the drug, which he swore was life-changing. Pinkett Smith began to feel hope.
“All I could think was: ‘What do I have to lose?’ If it killed me — great, mission accomplished. If not, thank God.”
Upon trying it, she heard voices that screamed, “Your kids will be better off without you. All they need is Will. All everyone needs is Will.” But after her first trip, she had an epiphany that she was worthy of love and deserved “the gift of being alive. ... Never again would I contemplate suicide.”
She sold drugs in Baltimore at a time when it “seemed practical.”
For a time, Pinkett Smith juggled being both a student and a drug dealer, she writes — supporting herself as she lived in a roach-infested house with her mother.
She says it didn’t seem extreme in her violent environment, where “one of my homeboys was shot multiple times and left dead in the middle of the street” for hours.
At one point, packing a .22, she envisioned becoming a “bona fide queen pin.”
“I just kept on stepping, deeper and deeper, into the s— that I believed was going to be my way out of it all.”
Fame — Will’s — tore her marriage apart.
Navigating fame was a point of tension in her marriage with Smith. “[He] wanted to be one of the biggest names in Hollywood and was always surprised that I didn’t.”
As Smith continued to ride his success, their “most profound difference” continued to grow, “a clash in our visions of what happiness looked like. Will was living his dream, and that meant I must be living mine, too — through him. He couldn’t understand why I was often unhappy.”
Worried that Smith would be tempted by the beautiful women around him, she came up with a “solution” — an open marriage — because she “wanted to be aligned with that which I deemed inevitable.”
As for why they haven’t divorced, she writes, “Children of divorce ourselves, we understood the challenges to the family unit that almost inevitably arise when marriages are severed. ... You can sprinkle in some abandonment issues in there for both us as well.”
After she and Will broke up, she describes falling into “an entanglement” — a likely allusion to her relationship with singer-songwriter August Alsina, 21 years her junior.
And she has some things she’d like to set straight. “For the record, my partner in the entanglement was not, as it would be said a lot, my son’s best friend.” They formed a friendship as she helped her “entanglee” through depression and grief. Later, she says, “zbery unexpectedly, [it] turned romantic.” After it “ran its course” in 2018, he severed communication with her.
The Oscars slap was a turning point for the couple.
The infamous moment and resulting media frenzy gave Pinkett Smith clarity about one thing: Married or not, she would continue to support Smith.
“What I knew, for the first time since our breakup, was that I would stand with him in this storm as his wife, no matter what. I had not felt that way in a long time.”
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