Jada Pinkett Smith and husband Will Smith have lived "completely separate lives" since 2016, she revealed in an interview with Hoda Kotb. The prominent Hollywood couple married in 1997 and have addressed separations and marital troubles, but never this specifically.
Though it's not a legal divorce, Pinkett Smith told Kotb in a clip released Wednesday on "Today" that it is essentially a divorce without papers. Smith and Pinkett Smith share two children, Willow and Jaden, as well as a son, Trey, from Smith's first marriage.
Representatives for Smith and Pinkett-Smith did not immediately respond to request for comment.
The news came as a surprise to many, considering Pinkett Smith's candor in her "Red Table Talk" series, in which she and Smith addressed her extramarital relationship in an episode in 2020, and the slap at the 2022 Academy Awards. At the ceremony, Smith infamously walked up on stage and struck presenter Chris Rock after Rock made a joke about Pinkett Smith's hair.
The full interview will air on an hour-long NBC News prime-time special on Oct. 13 at 8 p.m. ET. Pinkett Smith also has a memoir, "Worthy, " out on Oct. 17, which promises more details about their lives and relationship, as well as her upbringing in Baltimore.
She told Kotb that, "By the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying. I think we were both kind of just still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be."
Pinkett Smith added that though she's considered divorce, she hasn't been able to go through with it.
"I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce. We will work through… whatever," she said.
In a new interview with People Magazine, Pinkett Smith also said that she initially thought the slap was part of a skit.
"I was like, 'There's no way that Will hit him,'" Pinkett Smith said. "It wasn't until Will started to walk back to his chair that I even realized it wasn't a skit."
Smith has apologized several times for the incident, which got him a 10-year ban on attending the Oscars or any other academy event.
More than 67 million people watched Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debate. That’s way up from June
An estimated 67.1 million people watched the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a sharp increase from the June debate that eventually led to President Joe Biden dropping out of the race.
The debate was run by ABC News but shown on 17 different networks, the Nielsen company said. The Trump-Biden debate in June was seen by 51.3 million people.
Tuesday's count was short of the record viewership for a presidential debate, when 84 million people saw Trump's and Hillary Clinton's first faceoff in 2016. The first debate between Biden and Trump in 2020 reached 73.1 million people.
With Harris widely perceived to have outperformed Trump on Tuesday night, the former president and his supporters are sharply criticizing ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis. The journalists waded into on-the-fly fact checks during the debate, correcting four statements by Trump.
No other debates are currently scheduled between the two presidential candidates, although there's been some talk about it and Fox News Channel has publicly offered alternatives. CBS will host a vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance.
Tuesday's debate stakes were high to begin with, not only because of the impending election itself but because the last presidential debate uncorked a series of events that ended several weeks later with Biden's withdrawal from the race after his performance was widely panned.
Opinions on how ABC handled the latest debate Tuesday were, in a large sense, a Rorschach test on how supporters of both sides felt about how it went. MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes sent a message on X that the ABC moderators were doing an "excellent" job — only to be answered by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who said,... Read More