Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith make up one of Hollywood’s longest reigning couples—and also one of its most candid. As an iconic power duo, the Smiths celebrated multiple award wins, raised three kids (Jaden and Willow, as well as Smith’s oldest son, Trey, from his first marriage, to Sheree Zampino), and jumped out of a plane—together. But after walking down the aisle in 1997, they’ve also been the subject of divorce rumors, infidelity gossip, and more.
Now Pinkett Smith has revealed that the pair has been separated since 2016. While promoting her upcoming memoir, Worthy, on the Today show, she shared that, after the “entanglement” that first shook their marriage several years ago (more on that below), the duo never actually repaired their romantic relationship. Now Pinkett Smith isn’t shying away from discussing her relationship with Smith—and what this separation really means.
Let’s see how the Smiths’ romance unfolded—then unraveled—plus their most defining moments as husband and wife.
1994: Jada met Will on the set of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Though the relationship between Smith, 55, and Pinkett Smith, 52, sounds like a story ripped straight from the plot of a romantic comedy, their meet-cute didn’t have a traditional happy ending. They briefly met in 1994 when Pinkett Smith auditioned for a role as Smith’s character’s girlfriend on the ’90s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Unfortunately, the five-foot actress didn’t get the part because she was too short. Instead, the role went to Nia Long.
Still, despite their drastic height difference, Pinkett Smith would soon become Smith’s leading lady off-screen a few years later. To date, the pair have never appeared in a movie or on a TV show together. However, they have produced films through their joint production company, Overbrook Entertainment.
1995: The Smiths started dating.
During a 2018 appearance on Red Table Talk, Pinkett Smith’s web series, Smith expressed that he was attracted to Pinkett Smith when he later saw her on the college-themed TV series A Different World. “I knew there was something in our energy that would be magic,” he said.
Unfortunately, Smith was married at the time to Zampino, his first wife, and decided not to act on his attraction to Pinkett Smith. Smith later revealed on Red Table Talk that he knew Pinkett Smith was the one after an aha moment he had in a restaurant bathroom while he was on a dinner date with Zampino.
“I had a realization I wasn’t with the person I was supposed to be with,” Smith said. “I was sitting in a stall and I was crying and laughing uncontrollably, and I knew [Jada] was the woman I was supposed to be with, but I was never getting divorced...I went back out, sat down with Sheree and started going back on with my life.”
It wasn’t until Zampino ended things with Smith that he tried to woo the actress. He asked Pinkett Smith if she was “seeing anyone,” and her response was “no.”
“Cool, you’re seeing me now,” Smith smoothly told her. From there, Pinkett Smith moved from Baltimore to California, and the two began dating. Smith and Zampino officially divorced in late 1995. Watch the Red Table Talk episode here.
December 1997: Jada and Will got married.
Smith officially asked for his wife’s hand in marriage in November 1997. “One day we got engaged, and the next day we found out we were pregnant,” Pinkett Smith told People. That’s right; when Pinkett Smith walked down the aisle in a velvet, champagne-colored gown on December 31, 1997, she was three months pregnant with her first child.
The two married in a private ceremony at a hotel in Pinkett Smith’s native city of Baltimore. There were no invitations sent, according to People, because the couple wanted to avoid any potential leaks to the media, which explains why there are very few photos of their big day floating around the Interwebs. But Pinkett Smith posted the above Polaroid snap on Twitter of the pair sharing a New Year’s Eve kiss shortly after saying their “I do’s.”
On Red Table Talk, Pinkett Smith finally opened up about her wedding day, but it wasn’t the fairy tale we all might’ve imagined. “I was so upset that I had to have a wedding,” she remembered. “I was so pissed. I went crying down the freakin’ aisle getting married.” Watch the Red Table Talk episode here.
July 1998: Pinkett Smith gave birth to their son, Jaden Smith.
First came love. Then came marriage, and, well, you know the rest. Pinkett Smith welcomed her first son, Jaden Christopher Syre Smith, on July 8, 1998, in a speedy delivery.
“The doctor said it would take an hour and a half to deliver him,” she told Fit Pregnancy. “I said, ‘Oh it’s not going to take that long. I’m too anxious to meet this baby.’ It took me 20 minutes to push him out. My mother’s a nurse, and she was in there with me, and she was amazed!”
Jaden quickly followed in his parents’ superstar footsteps, catching the acting bug and inheriting the music gene from his rockstar mother and rapper/actor father. Unlike Pinkett Smith, their son has starred in two movies with his dad: After Earth (2013) and The Pursuit of Happyness (2006). He also released his debut studio album in 2017, Syre, which is taken from his middle name.
October 2000: Their second child, Willow Smith, was born.
Nearly two years later, the Smiths welcomed their daughter, Willow Camille Reign Smith, on October 31, 2000. Smith confirmed his daughter’s conception happened on a drunken trip in Mexico on VH1’s Dear Mama special.
“I’m not gonna be silly,” Smith said during his opening monologue. “I’m here to honor you. Just watching the piece with the kids, it takes me back to when we made them. Can’t help but think about that. It’s just amazing. It’s like you take Jada Pinkett Smith and an obscure town in Mexico and some tequila and you end up with great kids!”
Like her big brother, Willow also became a fixture on the entertainment scene, appearing in the 2007 movie I Am Legend alongside her father. Her first song, “Whip My Hair,” was released in 2010 and thrust her into the spotlight. Later, she began working as a model and co-hosted Red Table Talk with her mother and grandmother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris. Willow still sings, too; she released her fifth solo album, Coping Mechanism, in 2022.
April 2013: Pinkett Smith denied being in an open relationship.
After an interview with HuffPost Live on April 3, 2013, Pinkett Smith’s comments about her marriage raised a few eyebrows.
“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,’” she said. “Because at the end of the day, Will is his own man. I’m here as his partner, but he is his own man. He has to decide who he wants to be, and that’s not for me to do for him. Or vice versa.”
This caused many people to believe she was admitting to being in an open relationship with Smith. Pinkett Smith would later clarify her statement on her personal Facebook account, opening up her intimate post with the question: Open marriage?
“The statement I made in regard to ‘Will can do whatever he wants’ has illuminated the need to discuss the relationship between trust and love and how they co-exist,” she wrote. Read the entire statement here.
August 2015: The Smiths confirmed their marriage was rock solid (again).
Because of the way the rumor mill works, people continued to predict that the couple was headed for splitsville. In 2015, Smith was forced to state the obvious again on Facebook: “In the interest of redundant, repetitious, over & over-again-ness...Jada and I are...NOT GETTING A DIVORCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
2016: Pinkett Smith had an “entanglement” with August Alsina while she and Smith were separated.
On a revelatory 2020 episode of Red Table Talk, Pinkett Smith shared that she was separated from Smith in 2016 and that she and R&B singer August Alsina were involved in a “relationship” during that period. At the time, she said she and Smith were “over.”
In the episode, Pinkett Smith calmly sat down across from Smith and explained to viewers that Alsina had come into their lives when he was “sick” and that it felt good to be able to help him. “I just wanted to feel good; it had been so long since I felt good,” she told viewers about her relationship with Alsina, whom she had been helping as he struggled with addiction. “And it was really a joy to just help heal someone. I think that has a lot to do with my codependency.”
“I definitely realized you can’t find happiness outside yourself,” Pinkett Smith added. Smith also revealed that during that dark chapter of their marriage, he wasn’t sure if they’d ever speak again. However, they persevered after a lot of what Will called “therapizing,” and Jada facing both the “ugly” truths about herself and the beautiful ones. “We came together young, and we were both broken in our own ways, and to be able to make mistakes without the fear of losing your family is so critical,” Will said. Now they have “unconditional love” for each other, they added. Watch the Red Table Talk episode here.
May 2018: Pinkett Smith invited Smith’s ex-wife to Red Table Talk.
On the May 2018 premiere episode, “Motherhood,” of Red Table Talk, Pinkett Smith extended an invitation to an unexpected guest: Smith’s ex-wife, Zampino. The two women were completely respectful toward each other during their frank discussion, speaking candidly about their rocky past and how Zampino’s son with Smith, Trey, led to them becoming friends and a blended family.
July 2018: Smith referred to Pinkett Smith as his “life partner,” not wife.
After being together for more than two decades, the Smiths revealed that they’re well beyond relationship labels and traditional unions, as proven by a conversation Smith had on TIDAL’s Rap Radar podcast in 2018.
“We don’t even say we’re married anymore,” Smith explained. “We refer to ourselves as ‘life partners,’ where you get into that space where you realize you are literally with somebody for the rest of your life. There’s no deal breakers. There’s nothing she could do—ever—nothing that would break our relationship. She has my support till death, and it feels so good to get to that space.”
Pinkett Smith echoed her husband’s sentiments during a 2018 interview on Sway in the Morning. “Here’s the thing about Will and I; it’s like, we are family, that’s never going down,” she said. “It doesn’t matter, all that relationship and what people think, ideas of a husband and a partner and all that, man, whatever, at the end of the day, that’s a man that can rely on me for the rest of his life, period.”
2019: The couple took their love to higher heights (literally) by skydiving for Smith’s 50th birthday.
As a promise to her husband to do whatever he wanted for his 50th birthday celebration, Pinkett Smith threw caution (and her fear of heights) to the wind and went skydiving in Dubai with her partner of over 22 years. Smith documented the experience on his Facebook Watch series, Will Smith’s Bucket List.
“Jada, you know, she’s been the glue of our family, and a mother and a wife,” Smith said during the desert excursion. “Our life can be wildly constricting for her. I think she was going to experience the greatest rush of freedom and exhilaration that she’s ever had in her life.”
April 2019: The Smiths supported each other at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.
The Smiths headed to Southern California to celebrate Jaden’s debut at the annual music festival. During Jaden’s electric performance in the first weekend, Willow and family friend Jordyn Woods made a surprise appearance. But the crowd really went wild when his father joined him onstage to perform “Icon” during the weekend two set. Smith documented the entire experience in the desert valley in the YouTube video below.
May 2019: Pinkett Smith revealed how she handles Smith’s female fans in an episode of Red Table Talk.
On May 6, chef and lifestyle guru Ayesha Curry pulled up a chair at the red table to chat about everything from anxiety to groupies. After Curry shared how she deals with women following her husband, Steph Curry, around when he’s traveling on the road, she turned the question back over to Pinkett Smith, who joked about her daughter, Willow, having her back.
“I remember when Willow was like 5 or 6, and one of Will’s costars was in his trailer,” Pinkett Smith said. “And she came in there, and she jumped in her father’s lap, and she looked at the costar and she said, ‘My mother’s going to be here very soon.’ I remember Will telling me the story, and I cracked up.”
Pinkett Smith added: “There was only, like, one or two times where I might have gotten a little hostile where I felt like people stepped over a boundary and they were disrespectful. I think also you need to have an internal space of confidence. I know who I am, and more important, he knows who I am.” Watch the Red Table Talk episode here.
2020: The Coronavirus pandemic created a new dynamic in the couple’s marriage.
During a Red Table Talk episode titled “How Your Relationship Can Survive Quarantine,” Pinkett Smith said, “I have to be honest. I think one of the things that I’ve realized is that I don’t know Will at all.”
So how did the couple work through that realization? “The thing Will and I are learning to do is be friends,” Pinkett Smith elaborated. “You get into all these ideas of what intimate relationships are supposed to look like, what marriages are supposed to be.” She added: “Will and I are in the process of him taking the time to learn to love himself, me taking the time to learn to love myself, right, and us building a friendship along the way.” Watch the Red Table Talk episode here.
September 2021: Will says marriage “can’t be a prison.”
In a revealing interview with GQ, Smith told the interviewer that he also had other relationships while Pinkett Smith was dating Alsina. He elaborated on a topic Pinkett Smith has been open about on Red Table Talk: She doesn’t necessarily agree with the “traditional” expectations put on marriage. “Jada never believed in conventional marriage...Jada had family members that had an unconventional relationship,” he told the publication. “So she grew up in a way that was very different than how I grew up. There were significant endless discussions about, what is relational perfection? What is the perfect way to interact as a couple? And for the large part of our relationship, monogamy was what we chose, not thinking of monogamy as the only relational perfection.”
He also spoke about freedom in marriage. “We have given each other trust and freedom, with the belief that everybody has to find their own way. And marriage for us can’t be a prison. And I don’t suggest our road for anybody. I don’t suggest this road for anybody. But the experiences that the freedoms that we’ve given one another and the unconditional support, to me, is the highest definition of love.”
November 2021: Will released his memoir, Will.
The tell-all revealed plenty of details about Smith’s career and childhood, but the actor also wrote about his relationship with Pinkett Smith. “My divorce from Sheree wasn’t yet final, so Jada and I decided it would be prudent if we kept our relationship under wraps. (We were both pretty famous, and we felt it just wouldn’t have been a great look.),” he writes in the book. “The blessed yet unintended consequence was that we spent every single moment together, just us. The first three or four months were as wild a romantic whirlwind as our bodies could have possibly handled.”
He continues: “We fit together so naturally, and our energies combined exponentially in a way that felt like old friends more than new lovers. We had an unspoken language, and everything we focused on flourished.”
After the memoir was released, Smith sat down with Oprah for an interview and shared some sentiments about his relationship. “People are trying to put something on it: ‘Will and Jada—what they doing with other people?’ Will and Jada ain’t really doing too much of nothin’. Will and Jada are on a spiritual journey to cleanse the poisonous, unloving parts of our hearts. And we’re doing it together in this lifetime no matter what.”
“Me and Jada, to this day, if we start talking, it’s four hours. It’s four hours if we exchange a sentence. It’s the center of why we’ve been able to sustain [our relationship] and why we are still together, not choking the life out of each other—the ability to work through issues. I’ve never met another person that I connect with in conversation more blissfully and productively than Jada.”
March 2022: At the Oscars, Smith had a confrontation with Chris Rock.
Otherwise known as the slap heard around the world, Smith approached the stage—where Rock was hosting the Academy Awards—and hit Rock in the face. Rock had just made an off-script comment about Pinkett Smith’s appearance (she had previously revealed a journey with alopecia), and Smith, after slapping Rock, told him to keep his wife’s name out of his mouth.
The shocking moment caused a huge stir. Smith had—earlier that night—won the Best Actor award for his performance in King Richard, and eventually released an apology statement. “Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive. My behavior at last night’s Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable,” he wrote. “Jokes at my expense are a part of the job, but a joke about Jada’s medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally.”
October 2023: Pinkett Smith revealed that she and Smith have been separated since 2016.
Ahead of the release of her upcoming memoir, Worthy, Pinkett Smith went on The Today Show to share that the pair are still separated and have been for years. They are still legally married—on paper—but that they are essentially divorced in practice. Pinkett Smith had not previously shared the news because they were not ready. They were “still trying to figure out between the two of [them] how to be in partnership,” she explained in the interview. “How do we present that to people? We hadn’t figured that out.”
Cassie Hurwitz (she/her) is an associate editor at Oprah Daily, where she covers everything from culture to entertainment to lifestyle. She can typically be found in the middle of multiple books and TV shows all at once. Previously, Cassie worked at Parents, Rachael Ray In Season, and Reveal. Her love language is pizza (New York slices, Chicago deep dish, and otherwise).
