Almost two months after the infamous slap at this year’s Academy Awards, Jada Pinkett Smith finally addressed the elephant in the room on her Facebook Watch show Red Table Talk on Wednesday with an emotional episode about alopecia.
Pinkett Smith’s battle with the autoimmune disease, which causes hair loss, became widely known after Chris Rock called the actress “G.I. Jane” while presenting at the Oscars back in March, prompting her husband Will Smith to strike Rock onstage.
Likewise, the 50-year-old actress opened Wednesday’s show explaining that “thousands” of people living with alopecia had reached out to her following the incident and that she wanted to take the opportunity to “inform people on what alopecia really is.”
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Notably, the episode marked the first time Pinkett Smith had spoken directly about the Oscars incident since posting a vague message on Instagram and a brief statement about it during the Red Table Talk season premiere.
“Now, about Oscar night,” the Set It Off actress began the show, “my deepest hope is that these two intelligent, capable men have an opportunity to heal, talk this out, and reconcile. The state of the world today? We need them both, and we all actually need one another more than ever. Until then, Will and I are continuing to do what we have done for the last 28 years, and that’s keep figuring out this thing called life together. Thank you for listening."
Following that acknowledgement, Pinkett Smith talked briefly about her “anxiety” dealing with sporadic, unpredictable hair loss with her Red Table Talk co-hosts, mother Adrienne Banfield-Norris and daughter Willow Smith, before talking about the condition with a series of guests, including Niki Ball, the mother of 12-year-old Rio Allred who also suffered from alopecia and committed suicide after being mocked and bullied for her baldness, writer Gina Knight, and several men dealing with alopecia.
In the wake of The Slap, Pinkett Smith primarily received support from social media users who spread awareness about her disease following the telecast and the emotional toll it has on Black women, specifically. Her Girls Trip co-star Tiffany Haddish applauded Smith for standing up for his wife in a rather amusing statement. But for the most part, the couple’s Hollywood peers and members of the stand-up community, like Judd Apatow, Wanda Sykes, Amy Schumer and a slew of lesser-known comics on Twitter, have been more vocal in their defense of Rock. Most significantly ,the Academy suspended Smith from attending the ceremony for a decade for his behavior.
Considering that neither Rock nor Smith has sat down for a televised interview about their beef, there’s probably still more conversation to be had regarding The Slap. After what feels like a year-long discussion about the incident, we can only hope, like Pinkett Smith, that some level of healing and closure will occur soon.
