Jada Pinkett Smith is opening up about her relationship with the late Tupac Shakur, revealing why she rejected his jailhouse proposal.
The Set If Off actress is currently on a press run ahead of the release of her new memoir, Worthy. During an interview on All The Smoke podcast, Smith revealed ‘Pac asked her to marry him because he wanted her unwavering support, explaining that he was “in bad shape” at the time.
She told hosts Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson how “painful” talking about Shakur’s prison stint for the audio book was.
“Seeing him there, the condition he was in and having to leave him there. He was in bad shape,” Smith recalled of ‘Pac’s time at Rikers Island.
“I knew at that time that he needed somebody to do time with him, which I was going to do anyway. He didn’t have to marry me to do that,” she added.
Smith believes that Tupac “needed a rock” and turned to her “because of everything we had been through together’ during their friendship. However, she said the rapper would have ditched her once he was free.
“He just wanted to feel that solidified foundation,” Jada Pinkett Smith said of Tupac’s proposal. “Because I promise you, he would have married me and divorced me as soon as his ass left jail.”
Check out the clip below.
In a separate interview with RollingOut, the 52-year-old said she and Tupac shared a “soulmate friendship.”
Smith also claimed that although she thinks she and the West Coast icon “traveled a few” past lives together, their relationship never went beyond friendship.
“There was no chemistry between us,” she said before adding that a future together “wasn’t the purpose.”