Jada Pinkett Smith Breaks Down Over 12-Year-Old Girl Who Committed Suicide Due to Alopecia (Exclusive)

etonline.com:

The  is digging deep into the impact of alopecia — and getting emotional. In these exclusive clips from Wednesday's episode, Jada Pinkett Smith and her co-hosts, Willow Smith and Adrienne «Gammy» Banfield-Norris sit down with Niki Ball, the mother of 12-year-old Rio Allred, who suffered from alopecia and took her own life after being relentlessly mocked and bullied.In the first clip, Niki walks the hosts through the morning of March 14, when she found her daughter.

Niki, who also has a 7-year-old daughter named Avry, noted that her two girls shared a room at the time and that initially, it was a morning like any other. «I thought it was weird that the lamp was still on,» she recalled, tearing up. «Then I kind of got this weird [feeling like] 'something is wrong.' So then I went all the way into her room and she had hung herself with a pair of jeans from her loft bed.» The second clip follows Niki's retelling of the tragic morning, as Jada asks the mother how the family is healing in the aftermath of Rio's death.

Niki admits that she still worries about her family, sharing that they are «all in this fog.» «I feel like I have to stay strong,» she added, saying that she finds it difficult to talk to Avry about the death of her older sister. «You can't see that grief monster's there, but you know they're there and they're just gonna come grab you at any second… How do you sit down and tell your 7-year-old, a) that her sister is gone but b) by her own hand?»The episode is a particularly poignant one for the hosts of  Jada has been vocal about her struggles with alopecia, even opening up about her hair journey during a September 2021 episode of .