Jada Pinkett Smith, actor Will Smith’s wife, says she thought the infamous Oscars slap in which her husband marched onto the stage and smacked comedian Chris Rock was “a skit.”
“I thought, ‘This is a skit,’” Pinkett Smith told PEOPLE. “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.”
Pinkett Smith added that the first thing she said to her husband once they were alone was, “Are you okay?”
Her new memoir, Worthy, reportedly touches upon more of what went through her mind during the infamous slap, as well as the revelation that she and Smith “had been living separate lives and were there as family, not as husband and wife,” at the time of the 2022 Academy Awards.
“But when I hear Will yell ‘wife’ in the chaos of the moment, an internal shift of, ‘Oh shit… I am his wife!’ happens instantly,” she explained in her book.
Despite smacking Rock across the face, Smith was later able to collect his Best Actor award for his performance in King Richard. But in the days that followed, the Bad Boys star was banned for 10 years from attending Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences events, including the Oscars.
Smith has since apologized for his behavior, while Rock has refrained from publicly commenting on what happened — until when his Netflix standup comedy special, Chris Rock: Selective Outrage, in March, in which the comedian said he does not think of himself as a victim.
Earlier this year, a source told PEOPLE that Smith has “tried unsuccessfully to make amends in the best way he could with Chris” in the months following the attack.
Meanwhile, Rock’s friend and fellow comedian Leslie Jones recently told the magazine that Rock “had to go to counseling with his daughters” after actor Smith smacked him across the face at the Oscars last year.
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