Will Smith Oscars slap: Did tensions over open marriage, childhood trauma feed into violent attack?
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From their kooky views about parenting to their very unusual take on marital fidelity, Will and Jada Smith have long been Hollywood’s ultimate Odd Couple.
For those brave enough to prick their preposterous bubble, and most do so only gently given they’re such a formidable power pair, they are a comedian’s dream.
So they’d been a target before for Oscars presenter Chris Rock when, just minutes before being named Best Actor, Smith also picked up the Most Outrageous Oscars Behaviour in History award by smacking Rock after he joked about his wife’s hair.
The audience’s decision to give him a rousing ovation for his acting gong even as Rock was still rubbing his face speaks volumes for Hollywood’s craven hypocrisy.
Only belatedly last night did the Oscars bosses condemn Smith’s behaviour, saying they will “explore further action and consequences in according with our bylaws, standards of conduct and California law”.
Will Smith, star of Independence Day and Men In Black, once told the Mail: “I don’t think people understand my background. I’m happy all the time and people see me smiling. I don’t think people realise the path I’ve taken to get where I am and the beast that lurks when provoked.”
It’s fair to assume that everybody knows about the beast now. It’s actually not the first time that Smith, 53, has been accused of harbouring a nasty temper behind the smiley Mr Nice Guy facade.
In 1989, the actor and rapper spent a night in jail over his involvement in an incident that, according to Philadelphia police, almost left his record producer, William Hendricks, blind.
Days after winning a Grammy Award, he was charged with aggravated assault, reckless endangerment and criminal conspiracy.
Charges were later dropped.
Another possible clue to his temperament was revealed in a 2021 memoir in which he confided that his father, a fridge engineer, used to beat up his mother and that, although only a young child, he felt a coward for not intervening.
Years later, when his father had cancer and was confined to a wheelchair, he had considered killing him to avenge his mother, he said.
Indeed in his Sunday night acceptance speech, he talked emotionally of a higher power calling on him “to love people and to protect people and to be a river to my people”.
After he married Jada Pinkett in 1997, his private life appeared to settle down and they went on to establish their union as one of Hollywood’s most enduring.
Enduring but hardly conventional – given the subsequent revelations about their unorthodox marriage.
They met in 1994 when she auditioned for the role of his character’s girlfriend in his hit sitcom the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (she was too short and another actress got the part).
Two years earlier, Smith had married actress Sheree Zampino and they had a son, Trey.
But when he set eyes on Jada, he said, he realised he’d married the wrong woman.
“‘There was a unique, beautiful power,” claimed Smith of his first evening out with Jada. “We had that moment and we connected, but I was married.”
The following night he dined out with Sheree but had to go to the bathroom where he “broke down in tears”.
Sheree filed for divorce on Valentine’s Day in 1995 and Smith married Jada two years later
And yet Jada later revealed she’d never actually wanted to marry him.
She’d always had her doubts about marriage but felt pressured into it after she fell pregnant with their first child, Jaden.
Somewhat clinically, she said that she knew she was pregnant “just four seconds” after the couple had sex.
“I was so upset that I had to have a wedding,” she said in 2018.
“I cried the whole way down the aisle.”
She added: “I just never really agreed with the construct. I still don’t.”
Smith, however, felt the exact opposite, admitting: “here wasn’t a day in my life that I wanted anything other than being married and having a family. From literally five years old, I was picturing what my family would be.”
They had a second child, Willow, three years later.
Now two precocious 20-somethings, Jaden and Willow have been home-schooled and are now a rapper and a singer respectively.
Arguably, they are even more ostentatiously absurd, telling an interviewer in all seriousness how they can control and bend time. “I can make it go slow or fast, however I please, and that’s how I know it doesn’t exist,” Willow said.
Her brother agreed: “On the level of being here on Earth, if you are aware in a moment, one second can last a year.”
And they meant it.
Their father is similarly prone to ludicrous pronouncements, insisting for instance of their open marriage that he and Jada are never unfaithful because they’re always honest with each other about their philandering.
Will and Jada’s relationship was the subject of intense speculation from the start, and Jada was fully aware of it.
“I’ve heard all the things – their marriage is not real, he’s gay, she’s gay, they swing,” she said in 2009.
“I tell you what, it’s too hard to be in a pretend marriage.”
And yet, “pretend”’ might have been the word that some would have used when R&B singer August Alsina revealed in 2020 that he’d had a long-time affair with Jada while she was married to Smith.
The couple initially denied it and then admitted it happened after the Smiths temporarily split up a few years earlier.
Alsina had been introduced to Jada by her son, Jaden, at a London music festival in 2015.
Friends said Alsina – 21 years younger than Jada, who he described as “God’s divinity” – became so close to the Smiths that he went on holiday with them and stayed at their AUD$56 million mansion in Calabasas, Los Angeles.
He claimed that Smith had actually given his blessing to his affair with his wife – an allegation that Jada denied.
Meanwhile, Smith admitted to interviewers that his wife wasn’t the only one sleeping around.
They’d both started to explore polygamy after they were “miserable” and realised “something had to change”.
He portentously told GQ magazine last year: “We have given each other trust and freedom, with the belief that everybody has to find their own way.”
The couple, who could never be accused of failing to take themselves seriously (Smith once said he planned to become US president), had had “endless discussions” about the nature of “relational perfection”, said Smith.
And he admitted that he’d once harboured a fantasy about having a 20-strong “harem of girlfriends” including actress Halle Berry and ballerina Misty Copeland.
Although his Christian upbringing had made him feel ashamed of his steamy thoughts, a “celebrity intimacy counsellor” had helped him to “realise that my thoughts were not sins and even acting on an impure thought didn’t make me a piece of s***”.
Indeed, Jada implied long ago that she’d given Smith the go-ahead to find other sexual partners, saying: “I’ve always told Will, ‘You can do whatever you want as long as you can look at yourself in the mirror and be okay’.”
The Smiths have largely kept mum about who they have been sharing their open marriage with.
In 2011, it was claimed Jada and singer Marc Anthony, then married to Jennifer Lopez, were “inappropriately close” and were caught together at the family home.
They denied the claims.
Will Smith was rumoured to have started an affair with actress Margot Robbie in 2015 while they were making Focus, which necessitated them filming torrid sex scenes.
Both stars denied the claims although Robbie, during an episode of US TV’s Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, chose to drink a shot of alcohol rather than discuss Smith.
The Smiths have also spent many years batting off accusations that they are in thrall to Scientology, classified as a religion in the US but a cult in other countries. After being introduced to it in 2004 by Tom Cruise, the couple donated generously to the church, most controversially when they spent almost AUD$1.7 million in 2008 to set up a school.
They said they designed the unconventional curriculum of their “leadership academy” but insiders claimed it was effectively based on Scientology.
Both Jaden and Willow attended, but the school closed six years later when most of the parents removed their children.
Tony Ortega, an expert on the controversial group, said yesterday that the couple left Scientology in 2015 and that Will, at least, only ever “dabbled”.
Given these extraordinary twists in Will and Jada’s relationship, it’s a little ironic that Will has now put his future in jeopardy by leaping so violently to her defence.
© Daily Mail
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