Jada Pinkett Smith Has Revealed How She Had Actually Been Separated From Will For *A Long Time* Before The Oscars Slap

Jada Pinkett Smith has revealed a lot about her marriage to Will Smith during Red Table Talk. She has fanned those flames quite a bit on her show and elsewhere (even complaining about their sex life to Gwyneth Paltrow), but that arguable over-sharing tendency largely stopped when Will hauled off and smacked Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars. Chris waited a few weeks before eviscerating Will during a stand-up set, but Jada stayed pretty mum, even leaving The Slap out of the followup Red Table Talk trailer.

Jada now discusses that and a lot more in her upcoming memoir, Worthy. As previewed by PEOPLE, she was definitely holding back until this point. Among several other revelations, Jada answered to the long-standing public speculation that she and Will’s marriage had been struggling. In fact, she says that they were separated for — whoa — six years prior to that fateful night:

“We’re still figuring it out,” Jada says of the state of their marriage. She says they had been separated for six years before the Oscars in 2022. “We’ve been doing some really heavy-duty work together. We just got deep love for each other and we are going to figure out what that looks like for us.”

The pair has been married since 1997 (the above photo with Rock was taken backstage during 1994’s Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards), and Jada has also been open about an extramarital affair on her side. PEOPLE further details what she was thinking in the moments after The Slap happened:

“I thought, ‘This is a skit.’ Like many people watching the incident unfold on live TV, she didn’t believe it was real at first. “I was like, ‘There’s no way that Will hit him,'” Jada, 52, recalls. “It wasn’t until Will started to walk back to his chair that I even realized it wasn’t a skit.” The first words she uttered to Will once they were alone after the show were “Are you okay”

On the subject Will being “okay” or not, Jada then revealed that she plans to be “by his side” but that he will “have to figure this out for himself.” This will be, surely, only one of several difficult topics in Jada’s book. She will also discuss a period of her own deep depression and go back to her early days in Baltimore, “where she sold drugs,” along with many Hollywood happenings in between.

Jada’s book, Worthy, goes arrives in book stores on October 17.