Will Smith’s Oscars slap made Jada realize she’ll ‘never leave’ him – even though she cried on wedding day

nypost.com:

Jada Pinkett Smith once said she “never” wanted to marry Will Smith — and even cried at their “horrible” wedding. Now, she says the actor slapping Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars actually saved their marriage.In a new interview with the Daily Mail’s YOU Magazine, the 52-year-old actress called the altercation between Smith and Rock the “holy slap.”“I nearly didn’t even attend the Oscars that year, but I’m glad I did,” Jada told the outlet. “I call it the ‘holy slap’ now because so many positive things came after it.”“That moment of the s— hitting the fan is when you see where you really are,” she continued. “After all those years trying to figure out if I would leave Will’s side, it took that slap for me to see I will never leave him.”She added: “Who knows where our relationship would be if that hadn’t happened?”In October, Pinkett Smith revealed while promoting her memoir, Worthy, that she and the “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” alum, 55, were actually separated when he slapped Rock (ultimately getting banned from Academy Award events for the next 10 years.) They’ve been living separate lives for seven years, but appeared to grow closer during her book tour.“I think by the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying,” Pinkett Smith told “Today” show’s Hoda Kotb, 59. “I think we were both kind of just still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.”“I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce.

We will work through whatever,” she continued. “And I just haven’t been able to break that promise.”On Oscars night, Smith screamed from his seat at Rock to keep his “wife’s name” out of his mouth after he made a “G.I.