On Wednesday, wellness mogul Gwyneth Paltrow stopped by Facebook Watch’s Red Table Talk to promote her latest Netflix series Sex, Love and goop. Hosts Jada Pinkett Smith, Adrienne Banfield-Norris and, briefly, Willow Smith spoke candidly with the Oscar winner about sex and relationships. At one point in the interview, when discussing accountability regarding communication about sex, Smith described having to overcome this particular challenge in her 24-year-long marriage to actor Will Smith.
“It’s hard,” Pinkett Smith said. “The thing Will and I talk about a lot is the journey. We started in this at a very young age, you know, 22 years old. That’s why the accountability part really hit for me because I think you expect your partner to know [what you need], especially when it comes to sex. It’s like, ‘Well, if you love me, you should know. If you love me, you should read my mind.’ That’s a huge pitfall.”
Oddly enough, this rather innocuous admission kicked off a 24-hour pile-on against the actress on Twitter after an E! Online article deceptively titled “Jada Pinkett Smith Tells Gwyneth Paltrow Why It’s Hard to Maintain a Sex Life With Will Smith” and a similarly worded headline by The Shade Room began to spread. Despite Pinkett Smith clearly taking ownership of her flaws as a spouse in the interview, the internet used this clickbait as another opportunity to brand her a toxic, oppressive wife.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Father god, please release my brother Will from the shackles of Jada,” one user wrote.
“Jada wakes up every morning and says ‘how can I embarrass this n*gga Will today,’” another tweet said.
Pinkett Smith’s transparency in recent years about her union with the Fresh Prince star has resulted in some media firestorms and a few iconic memes. The Smiths, one of Hollywood’s longest-standing A-list couples, have long been subject to rumors involving cheating, an open marriage, and their ties to Scientology. But it was a 2020 interview with R&B singer August Alsina, in which he revealed formerly having a romantic relationship with Pinkett Smith, that their marriage faced new levels of criticism, speculation. and mockery in the public eye.
Pinkett Smith cleared up the accusations in one of the most memorable and unusual PR-cleanse strategies by a celebrity in recent memory, inviting Will on Red Table Talk to open up about her previous “entanglement” with Alsina and a time when the couple was on the brink of divorce.
One of the internet’s main takeaways from that awkward interaction was a screen grab of Smith with his head tilted and eyes glazed over, appearing exhausted. Despite the couple confirming that they had overcome that dark period in their marriage, the dominant narrative surrounding their relationship from then on, heavily touted by male social media users in particular, was that Smith was stuck in an emotionally manipulative relationship with a promiscuous, unfaithful woman. Even before the sit-down, jokes that deceased rapper Tupac was the actual love of Pinkett Smith’s life and that she was strong-armed into a relationship with Smith—based on a previous Red Table Talk interview with Will—were already being thrown around on Black Twitter, in a much more playful and non-judgmental fashion. But Pinkett Smith confirming her relationship with Alsina before the world was viewed as a public castration by many men who had previously only witnessed male celebrities confessing their extramarital affairs in the media.
In addition to Twitter’s characterization of her, Pinkett Smith has developed an alarmingly negative presence on YouTube as a topic of scrutiny by primarily male YouTube commentators and subject to sensational video edits of the infamous sit-down by trolls—a digital smear campaign similar to actress Brie Larson’s experience that’s under-discussed in conversations about the online harassment of female public figures.
Needless to say, Pinkett Smith’s image, despite her extreme efforts, has hardly recovered from last year’s revelation, which is why the internet, including some journalists, were so eager to accuse the actress of publicly humiliating her husband without taking the few seconds required to read her actual statement. Unsurprisingly, when Will Smith revealed in a GQ profile a month prior that Jada was not the “only one engaging in other sexual relationships” during their marriage, the internet was largely quiet.
Since going viral on Wednesday, Pinkett Smith clarified her remarks on Twitter, stating that she and Will “never had an issue in the bedroom.” Regardless, the public’s projections and misinterpretations have already become the story. It’ll be interesting to see how the talk show host navigates her raw, forthcoming persona now that she’s become the face of “toxic femininity” on social media.
