Jada Pinkett Smith has revealed that she and husband Will Smith made the decision to separate back in 2016.
The couple’s marriage difficulties are mentioned in Jada’s upcoming book Worthy, out next week, which was the subject for a recent interview with Hoda Kotba that’s set to debut in full on Friday. In a clip, shared by the Today team on Wednesday, Hoda tells Jada it was this revelation that surprised her “the most” while reading the book. From there, Jada confirmed the two have been living “completely separate lives” since 2016.
“Why it fractured, that’s a lot of things,” Jada said. “I think by the time we got to 2016 we were just exhausted with trying. I think we were both kind of still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.”
To be clear, the two are not divorced, and it sounds like that’s not currently in the cards. As Jada explained, she and Will “haven’t been able to break that promise” of working through "whatever" together. An actual divorce, however, was considered at one point.
See more below.
Jada and Will married in 1997, the same year Scream 2 and Men in Black were released. They have two children together, Jaden and Willow. Over the years, the couple's relationship has routinely been a source of headlines and speculation, including in connection with Will's slapping of Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards. That incident, often referred to as, simply, The Slap, has also been discussed amid coverage of Jada's new book.
During an episode of Red Table Talk back in 2019, Jada and therapist Esther Perel spoke at length on the topic of marriage, including whether there are “alternatives to divorce” when issues arise. At the time, Jada said there had been "betrayals of the heart" in her and Will's relationship that she considered "far bigger" than an affair. In fact, she said in the same episode that she and Will's issues did not include infidelity.
One year later, Jada and Will's relationship was back in headlines in connection with the widely discussed August Alsina "entanglement." The circumstances surrounding this development were openly detailed by both Jada and Will, again on Red Table Talk. Worth noting is that the couple said the "entanglement" came to a head while they were briefly separated, though the extent of that separation was not known at the time.
Worthy is out Oct. 17 and is being supported by a month-long tour including stops in New York, Memphis, London, and more.
