Actress Jada Pinkett Smith announced in an interview Wednesday that she has been separated from her husband Will Smith since 2016, six years before the famous “Oscars slap” that marred last year’s prestigious awards ceremony.
Jayda and Will drew attention after Smith slapped comedian Chris Rock on stage for making a joke about Jayda’s shaved head during the 2022 Oscars.
Smith told NBC News that she and Will had “completely drifted apart” several years before the Oscars.
“By the time we got to 2016, we were really tired of trying to fix the relationship,” she said in a video clip of an interview from her new memoir, “Worthy.”
In 2020, Jayta spoke publicly about her extramarital affair with singer August Alsina when she separated from her husband several years ago.
According to excerpts released Wednesday, the split continues to this day, even though the couple is still legally married.
Asked why they chose to keep their breakup under wraps, Jayada said they were “not ready yet” to reveal it and were “still trying to figure out how to build a partnership between us.”
“We loved each other so much that we were trying to figure out what that meant to us,” she told People magazine in a separate interview.
Jayada touched on the Oscars last March in her memoir, excerpts of which were released on Wednesday.
Will Smith took to the Oscars stage in March 2022 to slam Rock over the hair of his wife, actress Jayda Pinkett Smith, who suffers from alopecia areata.
Jayada said in those quarters that she first thought the room was a “comic move.”
“We lived separately and attended the Oscars as a family, not as husband and wife,” she wrote.
The couple met for the first time in 1994 during the filming of the series “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”.
At the time, Smith was married to his first wife, whom he later divorced.
Jayta and Willow have two children, Jaden and Willow.
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