I Love Old School Music fam,’ as we all know – everybody and their mommas have already heard about the many rumored uh…transgressions and goings-on within the ever-so-controversial, yet loving marriage between Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith. Not that it’s any of our business, but the Smiths have, in recent years, openly made it a part of everyone’s business after confirming Jada’s affair with singer August Alsina on “Red Table Talk” in 2020. Welp…apparently, now it’s Will’s turn to take that plunge into their increasingly transparent marriage…and the seemingly extra-curricular activities that come along with their union.
That brings us to today, and why the Smiths are trending on social media yet again. Will Smith has just unleashed several more confessions about the external relationship(s) they’ve reportedly had outside of their marriage, in his new interview with GQ Magazine, in which he discussed his upcoming memoir. He’s also confirmed that it was Jada who never wanted to have a “traditional marriage” from the get-go…an outlook that he apparently has willingly embraced throughout their 24-year union.
Peep some of the excerpts from Will’s interview below…
On why he and Jada decided to go public about their marriage:
“The pursuit of truth is the only way to be happy in this lifetime,” Smith told me. “And we sort of came to the agreement that authenticity was the release from the shackles of fame and public scrutiny.” When you tell the truth, the pair reasoned, you never have to fear being found out.
Will confessed to wanting a “Harem of girlfriends”…including Halle Berry:
Will said his life coach eventually had to help talk him down from the fantasy of wanting to have a “harem of girlfriends” – 20 to be exact. Will confessed that he wanted to invite Halle Berry and ballerina, Misty Copeland, to become a part of his “harem”:
“I don’t know where I saw it or some shit as a teenager, but the idea of traveling with 20 women that I loved and took care of and all of that, it seemed like a really great idea,” Smith explained to me with a laugh. “And then, after we played it out a little bit, I was like, ‘That would be horrific. That would be horrific.’ I was like, ‘Can you imagine how miserable?’
“What she was doing was essentially cleaning out my mind, letting it know it was okay to be me and be who I was. It was okay to think Halle is fine. It doesn’t make me a bad person that I’m married and I think Halle is beautiful. Whereas in my mind, in my Christian upbringing, even my thoughts were sins. That was really the process that Michaela worked me through to let me realize that my thoughts were not sins and even acting on an impure thought didn’t make me a piece of shit.”
Will says he pressured Jada into having a “traditional” wedding ceremony, even though she wanted a more non-traditional one:
Jada, her husband writes, hadn’t wanted a traditional wedding ceremony but gave in to his pressure … “This would be the first of many compromises Jada would make over the years that painfully negated her own values.” Years later, Smith persuaded her to move into a massive 256-acre compound that she was dead set against purchasing. “Nothing good comes from spending your hard-earned money on a ‘family home’ that your wife doesn’t want,” Smith writes. “You are putting a down payment on discord and for years you will be paying off a mortgage of misery. Or, worse.”
Then came the breaking point during Jada’s 40th birthday celebration. Will says that in the years prior, Jada spent plenty of nights crying herself to sleep as his career grew and her’s stalled. But it wasn’t until the surprise 40th birthday party he’d planned for her that the you-know-what really hit the fan, to his surprise:
Things reached a breaking point by Jada’s 40th birthday, in 2011. Will had spent three years planning a private family-and-friends dinner in Santa Fe, where he screened a documentary he’d commissioned that chronicled her life and traced her family’s lineage back to slavery (and in which he tracked down a descendant of the white family who once owned Jada’s ancestors.)
When they got back to the hotel suite that night, Jada was nearly silent. “That was the most disgusting display of ego I have ever seen in my life,” Smith recalls his wife telling him. The two began fighting so loudly that a 10-year-old Willow, with whom they were sharing the suite, emerged crying with her hands over her ears, begging them to stop. “Our marriage wasn’t working,” Smith writes. “We could no longer pretend. We were both miserable and clearly something had to change.”
When questioned about whether or not he’ll be including more details of the now-public affair Jada had with August Alsina – and the rumors surrounding their marriage – in his upcoming memoir, Will Smith carefully and cautiously confirmed what many speculated for years — that Jada wasn’t the only one with an extramarital affair(s) under her belt:
At some point, their relationship stopped being monogamous. … “Jada never believed in conventional marriage.… Jada had family members that had an unconventional relationship. So she grew up in a way that was very different than how I grew up. There were significant endless discussions about, what is relational perfection? What is the perfect way to interact as a couple? And for the large part of our relationship, monogamy was what we chose, not thinking of monogamy as the only relational perfection,” Smith told me. “We have given each other trust and freedom, with the belief that everybody has to find their own way. And marriage for us can’t be a prison. And I don’t suggest our road for anybody. I don’t suggest this road for anybody. But the experiences that the freedoms that we’ve given one another and the unconditional support, to me, is the highest definition of love.”
Everything ain’t always what it seems on the outside, Will further explained regarding his and Jada’s now-infamous “Red Table Talk” discussion about her affair with August Alsina:
“The public has a narrative that is impenetrable,” Smith said. “Once the public decides something, it’s difficult to impossible to dislodge the pictures and ideas and perceptions.” Because the impetus for the Red Table Talk was Alsina’s disclosures, a viewer could have walked away thinking that Jada was the only one engaging in other sexual relationships, when that was not, Smith delicately explained to me, in fact the case. Or take one of the memes spawned by their discussion, a screenshot of Smith looking stern-faced and droopy-eyed. “It was midnight and we were going on vacation the next day,” Smith explained, noting that the details they were discussing were, by that point, years in the past. “It was like, no, no, no, guys, I’m not sad. I’m fucking exhausted.”
Will admits that he’s grappled for decades with always trying to please everyone – his fans, his loved ones, etc.. That’s why even though he had much more he wanted to say about his relationship with Jada, after further talking with her about what they’d agree to disclose, he told the GQ Mag interviewer he’d decided not to say anything further on the matter:
“It may seem hard to believe, but I would lose sleep over not giving you the answer that I know you could use,” Smith told me. “I want to help you, I want you to succeed, I want you to have a headline. But by the same token, I don’t want to deal with the backlash of that in the world. To say I don’t want to talk about that three years ago would have been fucking excruciating for me.”
He continued:
“The major difference is I tell the truth, even when people don’t like it,” Smith told me. “And Will Smith doesn’t.”
Props to Will Smith for standing his ground…and for being as transparent as he’s been thus far about such personal issues between him and his wife, Jada Pinkett-Smith. Best wishes to them going forward, no matter where their journey may lead them.
