\n<\/p>\n
Pinkett Smith also unpacks the vitriol she received for rolling her eyes at Rock\u2019s joke \u2014 a reaction<\/a> that some suggested spurred Smith to storm the stage \u2014 to illustrate how women are damned if they do, damned if they don\u2019t. \u201cIt was easy to spin the story of how the perfect Hollywood megastar had fallen to his demise because of his imperfect wife,\u201d she writes. \u201cBlaming the woman is nothing new.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHow is it that a woman can be so irrelevant and<\/em> culpable at the same time?\u201d she asks. \u201cI had to think about the narrative out there of me as the adulterous wife, who had now driven her husband to madness with the command of one look. I had to take responsibility for my part in aiding that false narrative\u2019s existence. I also had to chuckle at the idea that the world would think I wielded that amount of control over Will Smith. If I had that amount of control over Will, chile, my life would have been entirely different these damn near three decades. Real talk!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n By adulterous, Pinkett Smith is referring to her relationship with August Alsina, which she called an \u201centanglement\u201d on a 2020 episode<\/a> of \u201cRed Table Talk\u201d where \u2014 after the information surfaced, becoming a public spectacle<\/a> \u2014 she and Smith hashed out the already years-old chapter of their lives. The conversation ended with laughter and a fist-bump to their slogan: \u201cWe ride together, we die together, bad marriage for life.\u201d<\/p>\n The truth is the Smiths weren\u2019t together in the traditional sense when she was with Alsina, nor are they now. But they are not in an open marriage, nor are they uncoupled, polyamorous or divorced. They are something else altogether: life partners in family and business, long maintaining an agreement they call \u201ca relationship of transparency.\u201d In recent years, they\u2019ve lived separately<\/a>. As a 50th birthday present to herself, she bought her own place, moving out of their Calabasas compound.<\/p>\n In a way, her new home, also in Calabasas, closes the loop on a dream that started before they dated, when she was renovating an \u201cold-world tiny\u201d farmhouse on the outskirts of Baltimore that sat on an expanse of land that she envisioned filling with rescue dogs and cats, and a horse for her mother. During that time, she\u2019d gotten a phone call from Will Smith, who\u2019d recently split from his first wife. \u201cYou seeing anybody?\u201d he\u2019d asked her. \u201cUhm, no,\u201d she replied. \u201cGood,\u201d he said. \u201cYou seeing me now.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n