Jada Pinkett Smith Reveals The Oscars Slap Actually Saved Her Marriage To Will Smith

We probably all thought we were done hearing about the infamous slap Will Smith gave to Chris Rock at the 94th Academy Awards ceremony in March 2022.

As it turns out, more has come of the story.

At the Awards ceremony, Rock made some questionable comments while on stage, including that Jada Pinkett Smith's look reminded him of Demi Moore in the 1997 film G.I. Jane.

Because of her recent alopecia diagnosis, the couple was sensitive about those comments. Will Smith responded by approaching the stage, hitting Rock across the face, and then warning him to keep his wife's name out "out of his f**king mouth," which became a meme all across the internet.

As a result of the incident, Smith was banned from attending any Academy events for the next 10 years. It was also then revealed that Smith and Pinkett Smith had been separated since 2016, and it was rumored that the slap would be the final straw to ending their marriage for good.

But Pinkett Smith did not see it that way. Rather, she now refers to that moment as the "holy slap" because "so many positive things came from it," including the revival of her marriage to Smith.

While promoting her memoir, Worthy, which came out in October, Pinkett Smith said the "holy slap" confirmed for her that her marriage was not going to end.

Pinkett-Smith revealed:

"By the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying."

"I think we were both kind of just still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.”

"After all those years trying to figure out if I would leave Will’s side, it took that slap for me to see I will never leave him."

Fans of the couple were left with butterflies over the healing marriage.

But others were much more critical of the reveal.

Though it cost Smith his involvement in the Academy for the next decade, this was apparently just what Pinkett Smith needed to know how much she meant to him.

Consider this further proof that you can never really know what a couple might be going through.