Jada Pinkett Smith thought Will Smith slapping Chris Rock was “a skit”
Jada Pinkett Smith has claimed she didn’t initially believe Will Smith had slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars in 2022 and thought the act was “a skit”.
At the ceremony, Smith infamously slapped host Chris Rock after the comedian made a joke about Pinkett Smith’s hair. The actor later apologised for his actions and was banned from attending the Academy Awards for a decade.
In a statement, Smith previously said: “Jokes at my expense are a part of the job, but a joke about Jada’s medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally.”
He continued: “I would like to publicly apologise to you, Chris. I was out of line and I was wrong. I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be. There is no place for violence in a world of love and kindness.”
18 months after the incident, Pinkett Smith has now broken her silence on the event, telling People: “I thought, ‘This is a skit.’ I was like, ‘There’s no way that Will hit him.”
She added: “It wasn’t until Will started to walk back to his chair that I even realized it wasn’t a skit.” The first words she uttered to Will once they were alone after the show were “Are you okay?”
Actor Leslie Jones recently revealed Rock sought counselling following the attack. “That shit was humiliating,” Jones said in a recent interview. “It really affected him. People need to understand his daughters; his parents saw that. He had to go to counselling with his daughters.”
In the same interview, Pinkett-Smith also revealed she had been separated from Smith for six years before the ceremony in 2022. She said of her marriage to the actor: “We’re still figuring it out. We’ve been doing some really heavy-duty work together. We just got deep love for each other and we are going to figure out what that looks like for us.”
Watch the slap below.
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