“I surely wasn’t surprised that I got blamed. But I understood that that’s just the human nature of it all,” Jada Pinkett Smith tells PEOPLE
Jada Pinkett Smith is looking back on the aftermath of her husband Will Smith’s Oscars incident.
“It was ridiculous in how far it went,” Jada, 52, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue, reflecting on the rumors that she was somehow to blame for when Will, 55, struck Chris Rock at the 94th Academy Awards.
“But I also understood at the same time. Considering the false narrative that I had cheated on Will or I was like some adulteress, Will had never done that before,” Jada says. “And I think that when we just look at human nature… when you look at the breadcrumbs, people need something to blame.”
“And so people not knowing what was happening behind the scenes, I surely wasn’t surprised that I got blamed,” she adds of how some interpreted the incident. “But I understood that that’s just the human nature of it all.
Will, who won the Oscar for Best Actor during that same ceremony, subsequently received a 10-year ban from attending Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences events — including the Oscars — in the days following the incident.
Will previously stated his wife “had nothing to do” with his reaction to Rock’s joke, which mocked Jada’s alopecia. Among other apologies Will has made for the incident, he shared a video to his Facebook page and YouTube in July 2022 in which he directly denied that Jada “[told Will] to do something” in response to Rock.
“It’s like… I made a choice on my own from my own experiences, from my history with Chris. Jada had nothing to do with it,” Will said in that video at the time. “I’m sorry, babe. I want to say sorry to my kids and my family for the heat that I’ve brought on all of us.”
Elsewhere in this week’s issue, Jada says that she at first assumed the incident was “a skit” created by Will and Rock for the Oscars broadcast.
“I was like, ‘There’s no way that Will hit him,’ ” she says. “It wasn’t until Will started to walk back to his chair that I even realized it wasn’t a skit.”
Jada tells PEOPLE that the first words she spoke to Will once they were alone after the Oscars broadcast had ended were: “Are you okay?”
Her new memoir, Worthy, hits bookshelves everywhere Oct. 17.
