It’s been an eventful year for married couple Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, who the latter revealed, shockingly, had been living separate lives in private since 2016, while pretending to be happily coupled in public, in her recent memoir.
Now, the pair is publicly responding to claims that Will Smith had sex with Duane Martin, an actor who appeared on one episode of the Smith vehicle The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
“This story is completely fabricated and the claim is unequivocally false,” a representative for Will Smith told People on Thursday.
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Separately, in a preview of a Breakfast Club interview with Pinkett Smith shared on Wednesday, host DJ Envy mentioned the rumor about Smith and Martin, which, according to Envy, “just came out.”
On November 13, clips hit social media of an interview between gossip blogger Tasha K and a man going by the name Brother Bilal, who was claiming to be Will Smith’s “best friend of 40 years.”
According to Bilal, at an unspecified time in the past, he walked in on Smith and Martin having sex in Martin’s dressing room: “I open the door to Duane dressing room, and that’s when I see Duane having anal sex with Will.”
Rumors of Will Smith’s alleged homosexuality and that he and Pinkett Smith are swingers have plagued the couple for years, but Pinkett Smith refuted all of them in her memoir and in its subsequent tour, telling Hoda Kotb this fall: “I would say that none of that’s true. I definitely can understand why there would be misunderstandings, but none of it’s true.”
Now, Pinkett Smith says, she and Smith will be seeking legal action to refute the claims about the alleged tryst between Smith and Martin.
“Let me just say this,” Pinkett Smith said on The Breakfast Club. “It’s ridiculous, right? And it’s nonsense.”
“And this is a person that tried a shakedown, a money shakedown that didn’t work,” she added, referring to Bilal. “We’re gonna take legal action. Because it’s one thing to have your opinion about somebody, versus just making up salacious, malicious stories. So, that’s actionable. So we are going to roll with that.”
Even Cardi B got in on the drama on Thursday, weighing in on X (formerly Twitter), “I don’t like what people be doing to Will Smith. I be feeling like Will Smith is very unproblematic and he got a nice heart.”
In addition to appearing on a single episode of Fresh Prince, Martin also played the lead role in a show called All of Us that ran from 2003-2006 and was co-created by Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith.
