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Will Smith has responded to wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s statements about their turbulent relationship in her forthcoming Oct. 17 memoir, “Worthy.”
In an email to the New York Times, Smith expressed that Pinkett Smith’s revelations about their marriage in her memoir “woke him up.” He realized “she had lived a life more on the edge” and that “she is more resilient, clever and compassionate” than he’d understood.
“When you’ve been with someone for more than half your life, a sort of emotional blindness sets in,” Smith wrote. “And you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties.”
Pinkett Smith is currently out on a “Worthy” press tour, on which she’s already revealed key details of her memoir. Previously, Pinkett Smith had dropped the bombshell to People magazine that she and her husband had been separated for six years before the infamous “Oscars slap” incident, in which Smith slapped comedian Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards. The latter had made a joke about Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, a product of her struggle with alopecia.
“Jada, I love you. ‘G. I. Jane 2,’ can’t wait to see it,” Rock had joked, referencing the 1997 movie “G. I. Jane,” which stars Demi Moore with a shaved head.
Smith had gone up on stage and slapped Rock across the face before sitting back down and yelling, “Keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth.” Smith was forced to resign from the Academy and banned from attending Academy events for the next 10 years.
In an NBC News primetime special, Pinkett Smith said that she was “shocked” Smith had called her his “wife” at that time since they had been separated for so long.
“I think by the time we got to 2016, we were exhausted with trying,” Pinkett Smith told People. “I think we were both kind of just still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.”
