Jada Pinkett, Will Smith have been seperated since 2016

Jada Pinkett Smith has revealed that she and her husband Will Smith have been living separate lives since 2016.

The actress makes the revelation in her new memoir, Worthy, and discusses the status of her relationship, noting that the pair aren’t technically divorced and aren’t planning to take that legal step, in a clip from an interview with Hoda Kotb that aired on Wednesday’s Today show.

However, as Pinkett Smith confirmed to Kotb, the separation was essentially a “divorce” as she and Smith are no longer romantically together.

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As for why the pair didn’t share this news sooner, including when they opened up about Pinkett Smith’s “entanglement” with August Alsina and amid the infamous 2022 Oscars slap, where Smith referred to Pinkett Smith as his “wife,” Pinkett Smith says they weren’t “ready yet.”

“[We were] still trying to figure out between the two of us how to be in partnership, right, and in regards to how do we present that to people,” she said. “And we hadn’t figured that out.”

And as to what happened to cause the relationship to “fracture,” as Kotb put it, Pinkett Smith teased “that’s a lot of things.”

“I think by the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying,” she added. “I think we were both kind of just still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.”

Pinkett Smith considered getting a legal divorce but, she told Kotb, “I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce. We will work through whatever. And I just haven’t been able to break that promise.”

Still, she confirmed to Kotb, the pair “live separately.”

During a headline-making Red Table Talk discussion in 2020, Smith and Pinkett Smith discussed her “entanglement,” as she called it, with Alsina and revealed they had been “going through a very difficult time.”

“I was done with your ass,” Smith said in the episode.

“Yeah, you kicked me to the curb,” Pinkett Smith replied. “We broke up.”-Hollywood reporter