Jada Pinkett Smith explains why she and Will kept split secret for seven years

It’s one of the most puzzling celebrity revelations in recent years. if Will and Jada Pinkett Smith split up in 2016 – why didn’t they tell anyone?

Jada Pinkett Smith on the Today Show.

As Jada Pinkett Smith’s bombshell revelations about her marriage to Will Smith make headlines today, one question lingers: Why?
Why, if the Hollywood power couple actually split up seven years ago and have been living “separate lives” since then, did they not just tell the world?

Why, instead, did they put on a united front after their private 2016 split, cuddling up for the cameras on numerous red carpets and even sharing intimate “truths” about their marriage on Jada’s infamous tell-all talk show Red Table Talk?

Jada Pinkett Smith tells all on the Today Show.

Interviewer Hoda Kotb asks Jada exactly that question in her sit-down interview with the US Today Show, where she first airs the revelations she will go into in further detail in her upcoming memoir Worthy.

“I guess my question is – I feel like you’re a straight talker … except you’re not sometimes. Why do that – what was the reason?” she asks.
“I think, just not being ready yet. Still trying to figure out between the two of us how to be in partnership, right? In regards to, ‘How do we present that to people?’ And, we hadn’t figured that out,” is Pinkett Smith’s response.

Huh. One wonders if they shouldn’t have ripped the band-aid off sooner, as Jada now finds herself on the publicity tour for her new book, speaking to interviewers dealing with the brand-new information of a marriage breakdown she went through seven years ago. It must be tough to move on when all the world wants to know about is a break-up you dealt with in 2016.

Will and Jada share a kiss on a 2019 red carpet - three years after they’d privately broken up. Picture: AFP

Elsewhere in the interview, she said “a lot of things” caused the end of the relationship. “By the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying. I think we were both stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.”

In an awkward moment re-aired in the Today interview, Pinkett Smith is shown squirming during an interview on talk show Watch What Happens Live a year after the couple had separated.

After confirming that she and Will had been together for “23 years”, she was asked by host Andy Cohen how she keeps her marriage “hot.”

Jada squirms through a question about her "hot" marriage in 2017.

“Uhhh, how do I keep it hot? Y’know … uh … maybe … I don’t know. I’m baffled, really.”

With more to come from Today’s tell-all interview, Kotb told her co-hosts that it had been “the strangest revelation” hearing one of Hollywood’s most famous couples have been split up for all these years.

“Those two people haven’t called each other husband and wife in all those years …” she began.

“Expect for the appearance, everywhere they went?” co-host Savannah Guthrie pointed out.

Another of the Today presenters summed up the general reaction to the interview: “I have so many questions.”