As we discussed yesterday, Jada Pinkett Smith is doing a big rollout for her memoir, Worthy. Jada covers this week’s issue of People Mag, and she gave an exclusive interview to the Today Show, plus People has published some excerpts from the memoir. One of the subjects Jada finally gets to discuss in depth and on the record is this decades-long mess with Chris Rock. Rock has targeted Jada in his “comedy” since 1997, and at one point, years before the slap, Will Smith had words with Chris, asking him or telling him to back off. Following the 2022 Oscar slap, Rock did a big Netflix stand-up show where he repeatedly targeted Jada, acting as if SHE was the one who slapped him. He denigrated her, called her a “bitch” dozens of times and claimed that “she started it.” At the time, sources close to Jada went to People and noted that: “Jada has had no part in all of this other than being heckled. Chris is obsessed with her and that’s been going on for almost 30 years.” This whole time, Rock has been giving off “incel with a grudge” vibes, and guess what? Jada reveals that Rock tried to ask her out while she was married to Will!

She hasn’t spoken to Chris Rock since the 2022 Oscars: “[Do I have] any desire to talk to Chris? Here’s my desire: I just hope that all the misunderstanding around this can be cleared up and that there can be peace… I talk about this in the book, I think that there might be some misunderstanding between Chris and I as far as the 2016 Oscars. I think that he might’ve taken offense, which I meant no harm in offending. That wasn’t my intention. But I do think that there’s a big misunderstanding there.”

When she and Will boycotted the 2016 Oscars during the #OscarsSoWhite movement: Chris, who was hosting that year, made jokes about Jada in his monologue. And, in his Netflix comedy special earlier this year, Chris claimed that Jada told him he should quit the hosting gig out of solidarity. Jada admits to “not really recognizing the level of pressure [Chris] might’ve been under” at the time. “I probably should have called him and gone, ‘Hey, are you okay? And just know that although I’m speaking out about the Oscars, I do wish you the best and I just want you to know that,’ me taking the time to have called him and said that, just to touch base. But his feelings might’ve been hurt,” she says. But, Jada adds, “All we can ever do is just look at our part and see where could I have done something that would’ve seemed as if… Whatever misunderstanding might’ve been created, what could I have done to avoid that misunderstanding? The one thing that I think about is that call.”

Chris apologized after that, in 2016: Jada says Chris, 58, called her afterward in 2016 and she thought they’d moved on. “He apologized and I apologized to him as well,” she says. “So I actually thought that we were good, that the hatchet was buried between us. And we hadn’t talked since then, until 2022 came.”

Chris tried to talk to her after the slap: “Chris came down to the end of the stage and tried to apologize to me. He said, ‘I didn’t mean you any harm.’ I said, ‘I can’t talk about this now, Chris. This is some old s—.’ I thought this was [about] the Oscar 2016 and … their stuff that they had before I even came into the picture in the late ‘80s. I’ve got to leave that to Will and Chris to talk about, but they got their stuff for sure.”

On Chris’s joke about her baldness/alopecia: “I mean, that’s what comedians do,” says Jada. “I would just have to say that I am not really here to make any judgment on how people decide to express themselves and express their art. I’ll say that several times I’ve had my feelings hurt, for sure. I’ve had my feelings hurt a lot by Chris. But at the end of the day, too, being in the spotlight, it comes with the territory.”

Chris asked her out once: “I think every summer all the reports would come out that me and Will were getting a divorce. And this particular summer, Chris, he thought that we were getting a divorce. So he called me and basically he was like, ‘I’d love to take you out.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ He was like, ‘Well, aren’t you and Will getting a divorce?’ I was like, ‘No. Chris, those are just rumors.’ He was appalled. And he profusely apologized and that was that.”

[From People]

I would assume that there’s much more to the story of Chris’s obsession with Jada, but she probably doesn’t want to feed into his ego. Like, Chris, Jada and Will have all known each other since the late ‘80s or early ‘90s. Jada appeared on Chris’s defunct talk show back in the day. Reportedly, Rock wanted to be with Jada in the ‘90s. I’m just saying, I think there were probably more instances where Rock tried to shoot his shot and Jada turned him down or just didn’t realize what he was doing. All of his nastiness and horrible energy makes him seem like he feels jilted, or like he’s overcompensating for Jada brushing him off for years. Anyway, I’m not saying anyone deserves to be slapped, but there’s just so much backstory to that one moment.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.