Jada Pinkett Smith admits that her husband Will Smith wasn’t yet divorced when they first started dating.
She shared this news in a recent interview with Access, alongside her mother Adrienne Banfield-Jones. When she first met her now-husband of 20 years, he was still married to his first wife, Sheree Zampino.
“He was ‘div,’ ” said Pinkett Smith. “The ‘orced’ hadn’t happened yet.”
Banfield-Jones admitted that she did not initially approve of the relationship, nor was she the biggest fan of her now son-in-: “I think initially when Will first called you, I think he was still married or he was just separated, or something, and I said, he’s not available to you.”
Zampino and Pinkett Smith get along so well today that Zampino is even the first guest on Pinkett Smith’s new Facebook Watch talk show Red Table Talk. But that wasn’t always the case, especially when it came to co-parenting Will Smith’s son with Zampino, Trey Smith.
“I thought it was important to have that conversation because she was my entry point to motherhood,” Pinkett Smith said of the interview. “I was co-mothering with her. At that particular time, before [having a blended family] was popular, before it was even an idea, we were trying to create something that we had never experienced.”
Pinkett Smith hosts her new show alongside her mother and daughter, Willow Smith. It premieres on Facebook’s video platform, Facebook Watch, on Monday, May 7.
One of the upcoming episodes will include guest Gabrielle Union, with whom Pinkett Smith had a beef for almost 17 years. Talking openly about the feud allowed the two women to end it.
