Jada Pinkett Smith is addressing recent controversy over her relationship status with husband Will Smith.
"We’ve done it the best way that we needed to do it for us," Pinkett Smith said on "TODAY with Hoda & Jenna" Oct. 17.
Her response comes after fans took to social media to express what they consider a betrayal over the revelation that she and Smith have been separated since 2016, while publicly maintaining that their marriage was intact.
“They can feel betrayed and that’s OK because life is messy and so is marriage and, unfortunately, it’s not anybody’s business what’s going on in the most inner sanctum of our house," she told Hoda and Jenna, adding, "We can’t live for other people."
"People can be confused and people can be let down. If you really let down and read the book – that's what people need. People need context," she said.
The couple's long-time separation was revealed during a primetime interview with Kotb on Oct. 13, in which Pinkett Smith disclosed that they'd been living apart for more than seven years.
“Along the way, we’d had a lot of stop and go,” Pinkett Smith told Hoda in the interview. “By the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying. I think we were both kind of stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be."
The announcement was met with shock, especially in light of their joint appearance at the 2022 Oscars, in which Smith slapped Chris Rock on live television after the comedian joked about Pinkett Smith's alopecia, saying, "Keep my wife’s name out your f------ mouth.”
According to Pinkett Smith's newly-released memoir "Worthy," she and Smith weren't together at the time of the history-making incident, but the aftermath brought them closer.
"What I knew, for the first time in six year since our breakup, was that I would stand with him in this storm as his wife, no matter what. I had not felt that way in a long time," she writes in the book.
Despite the revelation that Pinkett Smith and husband have been living apart for years, she said couple is now working to reconcile.
“There’s no finding another great love, and I think that’s the point,” she said during an interview on TODAY on Oct. 16. “It’s like we are in a place now that we are in a deep, healing space. And we are really concentrating on healing the relationship between us."
Speaking to Hoda and Jenna Oct. 17, Pinkett Smith reflected on prior interviews she gave in which she addressed their marriage, even though they were apart.
For example, on 2017 interview on "Watch What Happens Live," host Andy Cohen asked Pinkett Smith how she and Smith kept things "hot" in their marriage, and she stumbled in her response.
Pinkett Smith told Hoda and Jenna that questions about their sex life weren't really "anybody's business" to begin with.
She also says that in spite of recent revelations, she and Smith were never "pretending" to love each other.
"Will and I love each other, so all the love that you guys have seen was real," Pinkett Smith says. "There's no pretending there."
Instead, they were just seeking some "privacy" so we could "figure it out."
"We were in limbo, not stabilized, both trying to figure stuff out and then give that to the world and have to take all the pressure, we not trying to do that," Pinkett Smith told Hoda and Jenna.
Though they are in the process of reconciliation, Pinkett Smith said they haven't moved back in together just yet.
"We will. Not right now," she explained, saying that for the moment, she enjoys space and time to herself.
Smith responded to the new memoir and all the recent speculation about their marriage by issuing a statement to The New York Times that said, "When you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life, a sort of emotional blindness sets in, and you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties."
When asked what getting back together looks like, Pinkett Smith says that she doesn't exactly know, but that together she and Smith will "build that" and that it'll be "something new" when it happens.
In the meantime, she says that their love is solid.
"We're in the most beautiful place, I will never leave Will's side. Ever. And that's all."
