Jada Pinkett Smith says she and Will have been separated for 7 years, thought the Oscar slap was a skit

Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith "just not ready" to go public with their separation for the past seven years

By Emma Keates | October 11, 2023 | 2:03pm

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Jada Pinkett Smith says she and Will have been separated for 7 years, thought the Oscar slap was a skit

Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith Photo: Mike Coppola

Hold on to your partners, folks. The year of celebrity splits is traveling backward in time.

In a bombshell new interview with Today’s Hoda Kotb, Jada Pinkett Smith revealed that she and Will Smith have been living “completely separate lives” since 2016. “It was not a divorce on paper, but it was a divorce,” she confirmed to Kotb of the couple’s separation seven years ago.

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That means Jada and Will, who married in 1997, were separated not only during the infamous 2022 Oscars slap, during which Will called Jada his “wife,” but also throughout Jada’s entire “entanglement” with R&B singer August Alsina.

As to why the couple put themselves through all of this very public scrutiny while still maintaining this giant secret, Jada said they were “just not… ready yet” to go public with the separation. “[We are] still trying to figure out between the two of us how to be in partnership, in regards to how do we present that to people, you know? And we hadn’t figured that out.”

Jada will presumably reveal more about why the couple feels ready to speak out now after all this time, in her memoir Worthy, out early next week. In the meantime, she also spoke to People about the infamous Oscar night when Will slapped Chris Rock. “I thought, ‘This is a skit.’ Like many people watching the incident unfold on live TV, she didn’t believe it was real at first,” she told the outlet. “I was like, ‘There’s no way that Will hit him.’ It wasn’t until Will started to walk back to his chair that I even realized it wasn’t a skit.”

As to why the marriage fell apart in the first place, it was “a lot of things,” as she told Kotb. “By the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying. I think we were still kind of stuck in a fantasy of what we thought the other person should be,” she continued.

Even though she and Will have been separated for more than half a decade now, Jada is holding on to at least one of her vows through the couple’s decision not to go through with a legal divorce. “I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce,” she said. “We will work through whatever. And I just haven’t been able to break that promise.”

You can watch Jada Pinkett Smith and Hoda Kotb’s full interview below.

EXCLUSIVE: Jada Pinkett Smith reveals she and Will Smith have been separated since 2016