Jada Pinkett Smith has lifted the lid on rumours surrounding her relationship with Will Smith. Photo / Getty Images
Jada Pinkett Smith has lifted the lid on rumours surrounding her relationship with Will Smith. Photo / Getty Images
After years of putting on a brave face, Jada Pinkett Smith is finally speaking out about her marriage, and has addressed rumours about her husband’s sexuality too.
In an interview with US talk show Today, she was given the opportunity to clarify claims that the couple were swingers and that the Fresh Prince of Bel Air was secretly gay.
“I mean, a million things were out there,” Pinkett Smith told host Hoda Kotb.
“No. You know, that’s part of it. I would say that none of that’s true. I definitely can understand why there’d be misunderstandings,” she added, “but none of it’s true.”
Jada Pinkett Smith is interviewed by Hoda Kodt on the Today show. Photo / Getty Images
The author of Worthy, Pinkett Smith’s autobiography, also made the bombshell revelation that she had been living separately from Smith for the past seven years.
However, they have continued to step out as husband and wife for public appearances.
“We live separately,” Pinkett Smith revealed.
Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith have been living separately for seven years, but put on a united front for public appearances. Photo / Getty Images
“I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce. We will work through whatever. And I just haven’t been able to break that promise,” she said of the couple’s separation in 2016, when the pair confessed to each other they were “just exhausted with trying” to make it work.
“I think we were both kind of just still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.”
Asked why the couple, who have two children between them, had kept their separation under wraps, Pinkett Smith said she just wasn’t ready to take it public. Plus, they were “still trying to figure out, between the two of us, how to be in partnership”.
When Pinkett Smith was accused of having an affair with family friend August Alsina, she and Smith remained quiet about their split.
It wasn’t until 2021 that she confessed to the relationship with the young rapper on her show Red Table Talk.
“I got into a different kind of ‘entanglement’ with August,” she said. “It was a relationship, absolutely.”
Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith (left) and Pinkett Smith with August Alsina in 2017. Photos / Instagram, Getty
She also revealed she had her husband were separated at the time.
When Smith’s infamous Chris Rock Oscars slap played out in 2022, the pair were also secretly separated but playing the old routine of stepping out as a couple for public appearances.
Speaking on the Today show, she told host Hoda Kotb of the incident: “These kinds of moments can do two things. They can amplify love, or they can really make you bitter, angry, resentful ... We’ve chosen to really look at this moment and heal.”
She also revealed that during her 40s, she suffered from severe mental health issues.
“I’d been struggling with depression for a long time. It got really unbearable,” she told Kotb and revealed she had used ayahuasca, a plant-based psychedelic that’s mostly illegal in the US but which she says was effective as a treatment.
For more information and support, talk to your local doctor, hauora, community mental health team, or counselling service. The Mental Health Foundation has more helplines and service contacts on its website.
