Will Smith confessed in a recently released video that he considered divorcing Jada Pinkett Smith after she urged him to “shut the f*** up” in front of a group of their friends some years ago.
The couple, who married in December 1997, has been the subject of intense media scrutiny in recent weeks after Smith slapped Chris Rock onstage at the Oscars in response to a joke he made about Pinkett Smith.
Pinkett Smith’s Facebook Watch show, Red Table Talk, from October 2018 has recently resurfaced, with Smith saying that he and his wife almost didn’t make it down the aisle because the Set It Off actress swore at him once.
In an interview with Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith, the couple’s daughter, and his mother-in-law, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, the actor disclosed that the incident occurred in front of 20 guests at a party before their wedding.
“I grabbed a newspaper and I said pow!” Smith said as he recounted hitting Pinkett Smith over the head, before saying he asked his then-wife-to-be: “‘Can I talk to you in the other room, please?'”
Will Smith (R) admitted that he considered divorcing Jada Pinkett Smith (L) after she urged him to “shut the f*** up” in front of about 20 party guests before their wedding.
He said: “We went in the other room, and I said, ‘Jada, this is the deal: I grew up in a household where I watched my father punch my mother in the face, and I will not create a house, a space, an interaction with a person where there’s profanity and violence.’
“‘If you have to talk to me like that, we can’t be together. We’re not going to use any profanity in our interactions. We’re not going to raise our voices. We’re not going to be violent. I can’t do it.'”
Smith recalled how Pinkett Smith asked in apparent disbelief if he would truly end their relationship “over some words.”
“I was like, ‘Yeah, I just did! We’re not cursing!'” Smith said as he recounted their conversation. “And her eyes welled up with tears, and she was like, ‘Okay.'”
“It was 20 years before we used profanity in any conversation that we had,” Smith added. “We didn’t use profanity in any argument, we never raised our voices, we took communication courses, all of that—and never had violence.”
“You really have to discipline yourself,” Pinkett Smith said when Banfield-Norris asked her how she dealt with her anger in situations where she didn’t raise her voice.
“For me, I had to discipline myself and really handle that within myself to say, ‘Okay, what are you angry about? And then come to peace and then go and talk to Will when I can actually have a communication.
“Because really, you’re not communicating when you’re talking to each other in anger. What I realized is like you’re beating up on someone you say you love.”
According to News Week, while Smith stuck to his marital vow, he famously slapped Rock at the Academy Awards last month after the comedian made a joke about Pinkett Smith’s shaved head. Pinkett Smith has revealed that she suffers from alopecia.
When Smith returned to his seat at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre from the stage, he yelled at Rock again to “keep my wife’s name out your f****** mouth.”
Smith returned to the stage less than an hour later to accept the Best Actor Oscar for his work in King Richard. The actor apologized to his fellow nominees and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences during his acceptance speech. Smith apologized to Rock through Instagram the day after the Oscars.
The Academy said on Friday that Smith will be barred from all of its events for the next ten years, both in-person and virtually.
“I accept and respect the Academy’s decision,” Smith said in a brief statement following the announcement from the Academy of his ban.
On March 27, 2022, during the 94th Academy Awards, Will Smith slaps Chris Rock onstage at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California. After Rock made a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, Smith struck Rock in the face.
