Braking News: The Smith Family: A Health Journey Unfolded…….See More

Oscar stage, on live television after Rock made a joke about Jada’s shaved head (she lives with alopecia).

Well, that’s what the silence is about. She gets it. Jada knows everyone has been waiting 18 months for her to say something. Here it is.

“I thought, ‘This is a skit.’ ” Like many people watching the incident unfold on live TV, she didn’t believe it was real at first. “I was like, ‘There’s no way that Will hit him,’ ” Jada, 52, recalls. “It wasn’t until Will started to walk back to his chair that I even realized it wasn’t a skit.” The first words she uttered to Will once they were alone after the show were “Are you okay?”

The answer is a work in progress, one that Jada has written about — among many other topics, including her difficult childhood and their complicated marriage — going to be by his side,” she says of her 55-year-old husband, “but also allow him to have to figure this out for himself.”

But Jada, as she details in her book, had quite a life before March 27, 2022. Perhaps lives is a better way to put it. “I was living a lot of them at one time.” After meeting multiple times in passing — and once he got divorced from his first wife Sheree Zampino — he called Jada and asked, “Who are you going out with?” Replying that she was single, Will declared: “Well, you’re going out with me now.”

Laughing at the recollection, Jada says, “Can you believe I fell for that?”