Jada Pinkett Smith has been very forthcoming with her personal life in recent months, but she’s now explained why she didn’t mention much about her “entanglement” with August Alsina in her new book.
Appearing on The Breakfast Club on Thursday (November 16), the Girls Trip actor was asked why she chose not to mention the R&B singer — who she had a romantic relationship with not too long after they met in in 2015 — in her Worthy memoir.
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“I felt like he’s been through enough,” she told co-host Charlamagne Tha God. “And I just wanted to be respectful in that manner. I really did.”
She then added that she hopes she can “heal” the situation with Alsina “at some point.”
You can hear Pinkett Smith’s comments around the 1:00:23 mark in the video below:
Despite starting their relationship around 2015, it didn’t become news until Alsina discussed it in a June 2020 interview with Angela Lee.
Not long afterwards, Pinkett Smith appeared on her showRed Table Talk alongside husband Will Smith to discuss the relationship.
“About four and a half years ago … I started a friendship with August,” she said. “We actually became really, really good friends.” And then, she explained, she “got into a different kind of entanglement with August.”
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While Alsina’s name was not mentioned directly in Worthy, Pinkett Smith did discuss the relationship, comparing it to a Hans Christian Anderson story.
The Matrix actor has made a lot of headlines as of late during her promo run for Worthy. One of the most noteworthy moments was when she revealed that 2Pac, who she had known since they were both students at the Baltimore School for the Arts, proposed to her back in 1995 while he was serving a prison sentence for sexual abuse charges.
“Seeing him there, the condition that he was in and having to leave him there. He was in bad shape. And so, when he asked me to get married, he was at Rikers [Island],” Pinkett Smith said during an appearance on Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson’s All the Smoke podcast.
“I knew at that time that he needed somebody to do time with him, which I was gonna do anyway. He didn’t have to marry me to do that. I’m here. He needed a rock. Because of our friendship and everything we had been through together, he just wanted to feel that solidified foundation.”
She continued: “I promise you, he would’ve married me and divorced me as soon as his ass got out [of prison]. He would’ve! […] I just think it was the mind state that he was in. He wrote me this long letter, and even before ‘Pac went to jail, he was starting to shift in a certain manner. Good, really good.
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“And I think that for him, he just felt like, ‘Okay, if I can tether myself, it’ll keep me on a trajectory.’ But trust me, he would’ve divorced me as soon as he — one thing he wouldn’t want me as is a wife. I know that for a fact! But I think just being at Rikers, it just kinda shook him a little.”
