Jada Pinkett Smith reveals in new interviews ahead of her book Worthy that she and Will Smith have been quietly separated since 2016.
“It was not a divorce on paper,” Hoda Kotb says to Pinkett Smith in a teaser clip from her NBC News special airing on Friday.
“Right,” Pinkett Smith replies.
“… but it was a divorce,” Kotb adds.
“Divorce,” Pinkett Smith nods in agreement.
As for the secrecy, the Girls Trip actress, 52, went on to say that she was just not ready to discuss it publicly. As for what led to the split, she said, “A lot of things.” By the time they split, they were “exhausted with trying” to make it work. They have lived separately since, but remain business partners and parental-partners to their children: Jaden, Willow and Trey (from his first marriage).
As for why she hasn’t pulled the trigger on the divorce, she told Kotb, “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.”
Pinkett Smith told People magazine, “We’re still figuring it out… We just got deep love for each other and we are going to figure out what that looks like for us.”
The Smiths have put on a united front in public during their split
While they figure out what it looks like to them, to the world, it’s looked like they were a couple. Yes, there was her “entanglement” with August Alsina, which Pinkett Smith brought to the Red Table in 2020. And Smith later said, in his own memoir, that he was unfaithful himself. By the time the 2022 Oscars rolled around, during which Smith smacked Chris Rock for making a joke about Pinkett Smith and told the comedian to, “Keep my wife’s name our of your f***ing mouth,” the assumption was that they were very much together.
However, in a book excerpt on People, Pinkett Smith said by the time of the Oscars, “We had been living separate lives and were there as family, not as husband and wife.” And — at events both before and after — they kept up appearances. Here are just a few of their red carpet moments since the split…
They arrived arm in arm for his Emancipation premiere in November 2022.
He even tenderly planted a kiss on her head.
They walked the carpet holding hands for the 2022 Oscars.
Inside the show, held at the Dolby Theatre, they had their heads pressed against each other as he won Best Actor for King Richard after the slap.
They shared a kiss at the 2022 Screen Actors Guild awards.
Ditto at the King Richard premiere at AFI Fest in November 2021.
As well as at the Aladdin and Gemini Man premieres in 2019.
Didn’t let on in interviews either
Their interviews were more of the same. While there were certainly red flags — again, the entanglement, but also Smith’s memoir abruptly ending after he wrote about their blowup after her 40th birthday party in 2011.
On Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen one year after the separation, Jada gamely played along talking about how she and Smith “keep it hot.”
Just last year, Smith talked on The Oprah Conversation about why he and Pinkett Smith were “still together” after all these years. He pointed to how they can talk for hours and have a unbreakable connection.
Pinkett Smith’s book Worthy comes out on Tuesday, spilling all the tea of the behind-the-scenes reality of their very public — and apparently complicated — relationship.
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