Jada Pinkett Smith reveals in her book that Chris Rock once asked her out on a date amid her divorce rumors with husband Will Smith.
In an interview with People Magazine, she explains, “I think every summer all the reports would come out that me and Will were getting a divorce. And this particular summer, Chris, he thought that we were getting a divorce. So he called me and basically he was like, ‘I’d love to take you out.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ He was like, ‘Well, aren’t you and Will getting a divorce?’ I was like, ‘No. Chris, those are just rumors.’ He was appalled. And he profusely apologized and that was that.”
Jada Pinkett Smith confessed to Hoda Kotb on Today that she and Will Smith had been separated for seven years. Jada confirmed that it wasn’t “a divorce on paper but by the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying.”
Jada hasn’t spoken with Chris since the Oscars slap, but she wishes everyone involved “peace.”
“[Do I have] any desire to talk to Chris? Here’s my desire: I just hope that all the misunderstanding around this can be cleared up and that there can be peace,” she says.
She acknowledges that she may not have fully grasped the extent of the pressure Chris was facing during that time. “I probably should have called him and gone, ‘Hey, are you okay? And just know that although I’m speaking out about the Oscars, I do wish you the best and I just want you to know that,’ me taking the time to have called him and said that, just to touch base. But his feelings might’ve been hurt,” she adds.
Immediately following the slap, Jada recounts that Chris approached her during a break in the live broadcast while he was in the midst of presenting an award.
“Chris came down to the end of the stage and tried to apologize to me. He said, ‘I didn’t mean you any harm.’ I said, ‘I can’t talk about this now, Chris. This is some old s—.’ I thought this was [about] the Oscar 2016 and … their stuff that they had before I even came into the picture in the late ‘80s. I’ve got to leave that to Will and Chris to talk about, but they got their stuff for sure.”
Will has issued an apology for the Oscars incident, subsequently stepping down from the Academy, resulting in a 10-year ban from attending the event. .
